Ambulance STARS: A Satellite-Driven Framework for Rapid Flood Impact Assessment and Time-Critical Ambulance Routing
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Floods degrade road networks at the same time as demand for emergency medical services (EMSs) rises, yet national EMS command systems rarely receive any information on flood-induced road barriers. This paper presents Ambulance STARS (SaTellite-assisted Ambulance Routing System), a service-oriented framework that links satellite observation with ambulance dispatch. A cloud-based flood detection service derives flood extent from Sentinel-1 SAR amplitude change detection executed in a cloud-based Earth observation data and compute backend and translates it into road passability layers. A routing engine then maintains an in-memory road graph whose travel times are calibrated with empirical ambulance speed models built from four years (2020–2023) of GPS records of an EMS fleet in southern Poland, with separate speeds for driving with and without emergency signals (61.8 and 37.2 km/h, respectively). An API gateway with single-file tile delivery, a replicated relational data tier, and an observability stack complete the architecture, and a web client offers dispatchers live routing and multi-unit incident simulation. The framework was tested on the September 2024 flood in the Municipality of Nysa, Poland. The SAR module delineated 665 ha of inundation and marked 8.5 km of the 656.7 km routing network as impassable (508 barrier points), and the same procedure applied to a reference optical mask of 18 September yielded 17.3 km and 1006 points. Because the SAR and optical acquisitions captured different phases of the flood wave, agreement on the rare impassable-road class was low, and the two products were, therefore, used to bracket operational uncertainty rather than to define a single ground truth. Applied without local retuning to Lewin Brzeski, the same flood detection workflow showed consistent performance against the CEMS reference product. The routing module produced statutory 8/15/20 min accessibility maps in 12–34 s under warm-cache benchmark conditions. With SAR-derived barriers, the share of the network reachable within 15 min fell from 88% to 80%, and 2 villages with 938 inhabitants lost road access to EMS entirely. With barriers derived from the optical mask, the 15 min share fell to 39.8% and seventeen settlements lost road access entirely, underlining how strongly the barrier source shapes the operational picture. Post-acquisition processing completes in under one minute under warm-cache conditions with road data preloaded, and satellite-derived road passability is fast enough to support near-real-time decision-making, subject to the constellation revisit time and to integration with EMS command systems.
Source: Remote Sensing
DOI: 10.3390/rs18173004
Institution: AGH University of Krakow
Language: English
Subfield: Global and Planetary Change
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $3,258
OpenAlex ID: W7208732181