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

arXiv:2610.31968v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: 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 Sk{\aa}ne region in Sweden. Our analysis reveals that ambulance travel times vary substantially by hour, day, and t