ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Future Transp.
Sec. Transport Safety
This article is part of the Research TopicAutonomous Vehicles: Revolutionizing Traffic Safety with Intelligent Active Traffic ManagementView all articles
Performance Approximation for Highway Emergency Rescue Systems
Provisionally accepted
- Jiangsu Sutong Bridge Co., Ltd, Soochow University, Suzhou, China
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Rescue vehicles (RVs) must respond promptly to spatially uncertain crashs on highways to prevent network-wide traffic disruptions. This paper develops an approximation model to characterize priority-based emergency rescue systems for RV fleets. By represent-ing each RV's state as either idle or busy, we construct a mathematical model in which the dispatch probability of a given RV is proportional to the utilization of higher-priority RVs and its own availability; the proportionality constant is derived from an M/M/N queuing model under random server selection without replacement until the first available RV is identified. We propose two algorithms to estimate RV workloads, response times, and cross-dispatch frequencies. A case study based on the G15 Highway (Sutong Bridge section) in China demon-strates how the model quantifies performance metrics, such as individual response times and cross-regional dispatch ratios. The model can also be applied to RV location planning, response section partitioning, and rescue performance evaluation in highway emergency ser-vices.
Keywords: Approximation model;, Dispatch priority, Highway emergency response;, Rescue vehicle deployment;, Response time;, Work intensity;
Received: 11 Nov 2025; Accepted: 04 Feb 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Song, Shu, Zhong, Jiang and Zhang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Jianhui Song
Xiaofeng Shu
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.