On the exploitation of Automated Planning for efficient decision making in road traffic accident management

Automated Planning can be fruitfully exploited as a Decision Support toolkit that, given a specification of available actions (elementary decisions to be taken), an initial situation and goals to be achieved, generates a plan that represents a (partially ordered) sequence of such elementary decisions that once performed the required goals are achieved. Road Traffic Accident Management is a life-critical task that deals with effective planning of emergency response when accidents occur, in order to mitigate negative effects, especially saving human lives that might be in imminent danger. In this paper, we exploit Automated Planning in the Road Traffic Accident Management domain. We specifically focus on providing necessary treatment for victims injured during accidents. This involves coordination of medical teams responsible for providing medical treatment to the victims and fire brigades that are required to release victims trapped in damaged vehicles. An empirical analysis, based in the region ofWest Yorkshire (UK) with a number of real accidents recently occurred there, shows the suitability of the proposed Automated Planning approach to be used in time-critical conditions, and confirms the effectiveness of the generated plans. We also demonstrated its usefulness as a tool for evaluating the impact of additional resources, in order to provide guidance for future investments.