Turn historical crash data, live weather, and road conditions into actionable safety intelligence — with a built-in simulator to plan before harm occurs.
PULSE is a decision-support system for urban safety and EMS resource planning. It doesn't just tell you where accidents are likely — it helps city planners, dispatchers, and analysts figure out what to do about it, and what happens if they do something different.
Most safety tools stop at the heatmap. PULSE is designed around the next question every operator actually asks:
"So what do we do about it?"
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📊 Risk Forecasting — Machine learning models trained on Madison crash data, weather, and road conditions generate short-term risk predictions across Madison, gridded by location and time.
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🚑 EMS Deployment Recommendations — Based on current forecasts, PULSE suggests optimal pre-positioning of limited emergency resources to minimize expected response time and harm.
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💬 Explainable Outputs — Every forecast comes with a plain-language summary of the driving factors: weather, time of day, traffic volume, recent incidents.
Data
- WisDOT Crash Records (statewide, severity + coordinates)
- NOAA / Open-Meteo (hourly weather history)
- OpenStreetMap via OSMnx (road network)
- US Census ACS (demographics, income, vehicle access)
- Madison Open Data (fire stations, EMS locations)
Program
- scikit-learn / XGBoost — crash risk model
- OR-Tools — facility location & resource allocation
- PyDeck — data visualization
- Python, FastAPI
- PostGIS for spatial queries
- React + Leaflet (interactive risk map)
- Recharts (confidence intervals, scenario comparisons)
- Real-time 911 dispatch integration
- Multi-city deployment beyond Madison
- Reinforcement learning for adaptive EMS routing
- Public-facing risk transparency dashboard
Built for MadData 2026 — Madison, WI
By Abhinav, Niyati, Sahana