Condition-based Estimation of Ambulance Travel Times

Abstract: Travel time estimation can be used in strategical distribution of ambulances and ambulance stations. A more accurate travel time estimation can lead to a better distribution of these ambulance sites. External factors such as weather and traffic conditions can affect the travel time from a starting location to a destination. In this work, we investigate how the SOS Alarm dataset of ambulance trips data and the machine learning model Gradient Boosted Decision Trees can be used to estimate travel time, and how these estimationscan be improved by incorporating aforementioned conditions when predicting travel time. Results showed that reasonable performance can be achieved for a subset of data where the precise origin and destination is known compared to a subset where the precise origin is unknown, and that traffic conditions could improve model performance on a subset of data containing trips only for a single route. Including weather represented as individual weather parameters did not, however, lead to enhanced performance.