Risk based Optimization for Improving Emergency Medical Systems

• Main Authors: SAISUBRAMANIAN, Sandhya, Pradeep VARAKANTHAM, LAU, Hoong Chuin
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2015
• Subjects: Computer Sciences; Health and Medical Administration; Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/2850; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/3850/viewcontent/C127___Risk_based_Optimization_for_Improving_Emergency_Medical_Systems__AAAI2015_.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

In emergency medical systems, arriving at the incident location a few seconds early can save a human life. Thus, this paper is motivated by the need to reduce the response time – time taken to arrive at the incident location after receiving the emergency call – of Emergency Response Vehicles, ERVs (ex: ambulances, fire rescue vehicles) for as many requests as possible. We expect to achieve this primarily by positioning the "right" number of ERVs at the "right" places and at the "right" times. Given the exponentially large action space (with respect to number of ERVs and their placement) and the stochasticity in location and timing of emergency incidents, this problem is computationally challenging. To that end, our contributions building on existing data-driven approaches are three fold. Finally, we provide an exhaustive evaluation on real-world datasets from two asian cities that demonstrates the improvement provided by our approach over current practice and the best known approach from literature.