Beyond Heuristics and Commercial Navigation: An AI-Augmented Decision-Support for Ambulance Travel Time Estimation

Overview & Synopsis

Accurate ambulance travel time estimation is critical for emergency medical dispatch, yet existing decision-support practices often rely on static lookup tables or simplified assumptions regarding how ambulance travel time differs from ordinary passenger-car travel. For instance, they assume ambulances simply travel a fixed percentage (e.g., 5%) faster than ordinary passenger cars. However, such assumptions are rarely validated using real ambulance operational data and may fail to capture the effects of trip priority, temporal context, and origin-destination. We address these limitations using historical ambulance trips from the Skåne region in Sweden. Our analysis reveals that ambulance travel times vary substantially by hour, day, and trip priority, and that commercial navigation systems fail to capture emergency-specific dynamics. We contribute a machine learning system to more accurately estimate ambulance travel time. To make the system interpretable, we explored SHapley Additive exPlanations and permutation importance techniques to ensure that our system captures operationally meaningful patterns.