A Novel Heuristic Emergency Path Planning Method Based on Vector Grid Map

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Apart from the excellent proposal made and contributions of the manuscript, there were some minor revisions recommended for improving the quality of the manuscript.

1) Some claims made in the introduction section were not substantiated and properly-referenced. For example, Line 51-53, Line 100-102, Line 112-120. Also, the author needs to check again the definition of heuristic. In my experience, there had not been a heuristic that provided an optimal solution, but rather sub-optimal or a close approximation to one. The definition gave seems to refer to exact methods or the so-called brute-force approach.

2) There was some undefined abbreviation, such as BFS which refers to breath-first search, right? Also, the majority of the manuscript uses excessive abbreviations, which could cause confusion and difficulty to follow. As such, it is recommended that the author provided a list of abbreviations to improve clarity and reading comprehension.

3) Figures and tables can be improved by including appropriately the legends, descriptions of the main observations, and the intention of the figure/table in general. Basically, both tables and figures should be self-contained and self-explanatory. Also, some figures (especially on the results), shouldn't be in the appendix which difficult to verify based on the result discussion (i.e., Figure 14-16).

4) Figure 10 mentioned the comparison of the results between three algorithms but was not differentiated appropriately which is which.

5) The overall organization of the manuscript needs to be reordered appropriately. Basically, how does Algorithm 3 to Algorithm 6 relates to each other? Is it ordered or works in parallel? I would recommend that the flow of the proposed approach is provided in a flowchart or the like to properly clarify the proposed contributions of the study.

6) Table 4 and Table 5 should be justified statistically since the differences between the approach/testing were minor and warrant further verification in terms of results reliability. Basically, is the improvement from the result statistically significant or just lucky? This also applied to Table 6 and Table 7 results as well.

7) Finally, I think the discussion made was not sufficient and does not do justice to the rest of the works/contributions. It may be more meaningful if the authors can discuss how different road network frameworks, algorithms tested, and graph accelerations approach, would impact real emergency planning and policies, with respect to the existing emergency path planning in place in the real world. The conclusion also can be enhanced to discuss more on the implications of the manuscript contributions, and more related works in not only emergency but also other domains (manufacturing, supply chains, computing resources/networks, etc.).

Anyway, I believe the manuscript is suitable for publishing in the target journal and provided excellent contributions to the body of knowledge.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The topic of this article is a good one. The algorithm proposed in this paper and the content discussed in this paper have practical application and guidance for the research and solution of the traffic congestion problem in big cities. And I think it has a certain degree of potential commercial possibility. 

I can see that the author has given a very detailed description of the construction of the algorithm and the details of the parameters. On the whole, this is a very good manuscript. I think it should be accepted and published. 

But there are some details like to discuss with the author. I hope it can make this article more perfect and make it easier for readers to understand its content and follow your work after publication.

The first question is on line 77 on page 3. A hypothesis is made that the distribution is random and Normal distribution. The author has a citation to support this point of view, but I don't agree with it. And your model is based on this assumption. Do you have a more reliable source of citation to support this hypothesis？Can you explain how assumptions about random and normal distribution affect the accuracy and effectiveness of your model?  I believe that not only Beijing's traffic is not based on random and normal distribution, but most metropolitan cities in the world are not based on normal distribution. I would like to see your model with wider adaptability in more big cities in the world.

The second question is Page 20 lines 679 to 684. You choose the average of the road network speed. Is there any reason to make such a choice? How does this approximation affect the validity and accuracy of the model? Can you have some discussion? Is there a better approximate alternative?

The third question is on line 687 on page 20. The grid size you mentioned is 288. My question is why do you choose 288？Is it because of Is the previous algorithm tradition？Is it better for your model to choose different grid numbers? I hope to see more discussions and attempts in this area, as well as comparisons. 

If the reason why you choose 288 is by limitation of data source, I still think you should dig the number of optimal grids. It is good to put forward a model, but we would like to see that this model is optimal and has broad-spectrum applicability. 

The fourth point is not mandatory, but it's just a suggestion. If you can make your algorithm model's programs public and put them in the supplementary data, it will increase your citation and popularity. More people will cite your articles and follow your work. 

Finally, I think your writing is redundant. You can try to make your writing more concise. 

In a word, I hope my comments will be helpful to you, so that your articles can be cited more after published

 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear editor and authors,

The manuscript "A Novel Heuristic Emergency Path Planning Method Based on Vector Grid Map" has an interesting topic in the line of spatial health to help emergencies, however I have the next points to analyst:

- The introduction section requires more attention about what will you do in your study? Some parts are more relate with methodology section.
- The section Related work is an introduction section. Please, consider it at an introduction part and a discussion when you compare your method with them.
- The algorithm 1 must be a workflow figure.
- About the method validation, did you do some test to validate the times? Maybe with real values
- The discussion section is only a conclusion section, please rewrite it with your results and comparisons or improvements.
- In a general way some section must be reorganized. Several information can confuse to the readers. In fact, some figures can be showed in workflows to clear the idea about the method.

Thanks for your answers.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

Thanks for your answers