Resilience enhancement of an urban road network during traffic accidents by optimally dispatching rescue teams

The efficient dispatch of rescue teams (RTs) during traffic accidents is crucial for the rapid restoration of normal operations in the affected urban road network (URN), thereby enhancing the network’s resilience during such events. However, previous studies focusing on optimizing RT dispatch strategies to enhance URN resilience remain limited. To address this gap, this paper develops a mixed-integer linear programming model aimed at optimizing RT dispatch during traffic accidents. The formulated model is solved using the commercial solver (i.e., CPLEX). Numerical experiments conducted on a hypothetical URN demonstrate that the model generates an optimal dispatch scheme. Compared to baseline strategies, the optimized scheme reduces the total objective function values by 27.36% in small-scale cases and 16.28% in large-scale case, respectively. Furthermore, sensitivity analysis reveal that accident severity and destination locations significantly influence the dispatch scheme design. Finally, the paper discusses the impact of several parameters on the model’s solution, showing that its performance is highly sensitive to several critical factors like RT dispatch costs, the maximum allowable delay time, passenger value of time, and vehicle travel speeds.