Improving law enforcement daily deployment through machine learning-informed optimization under uncertainty

• Main Authors: CHASE, Jonathan David, NGUYEN, Duc Thien, SUN, Haiyang, LAU, Hoong Chuin
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2019
• Subjects: Law enforcement; response time; police; deployment; MITB student; Computer Sciences; Law Enforcement and Corrections; Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/4682; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/5685/viewcontent/Law_Enforcement_Daily_Deployment_IJCAI_2019_pv.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Urban law enforcement agencies are under great pressure to respond to emergency incidents effectively while operating within restricted budgets. Minutes saved on emergency response times can save lives and catch criminals, and a responsive police force can deter crime and bring peace of mind to citizens. To efficiently minimize the response times of a law enforcement agency operating in a dense urban environment with limited manpower, we consider in this paper the problem of optimizing the spatial and temporal deployment of law enforcement agents to predefined patrol regions in a real-world scenario informed by machine learning. To this end, we develop a mixed integer linear optimization formulation (MIP) to minimize the risk of failing response time targets. Given the stochasticity of the environment in terms of incident numbers, location, timing, and duration, we use Sample Average Approximation (SAA) to find a robust deployment plan. To overcome the sparsity of real data, samples are provided by an incident generator that learns the spatio-temporal distribution and demand parameters of incidents from a real world historical dataset and generates sets of training incidents accordingly. To improve runtime performance across multiple samples, we implement a heuristic based on Iterated Local Search (ILS), as the solution is intended to create deployment plans quickly on a daily basis. Experimental results demonstrate that ILS performs well against the integer model while offering substantial gains in execution time.