Emergency Response Management (ERM) is a critical problem faced by communities across the globe. Despite this, it is common for ERM systems to follow myopic decision policies in the real world. Principled approaches to aid ERM decision-making under uncertainty have been explored but have failed to be accepted into real systems. We identify a key issue impeding their adoption --- algorithmic approaches to emergency response focus on reactive, post-incident dispatching actions, i.e. optimally dispatching a responder after incidents occur. However, the critical nature of emergency response dictates that when an incident occurs, first responders always dispatch the closest available responder to the incident. We argue that the crucial period of planning for ERM systems is not post-incident, but between incidents. This is not a trivial planning problem --- a major challenge with dynamically balancing the spatial distribution of responders is the complexity of the problem. An orthogonal problem in ERM systems is planning under limited communication, which is particularly important in disaster scenarios that affect communication networks. We address both problems by proposing two partially decentralized multi-agent planning algorithms that utilize heuristics and exploit the structure of the dispatch problem. We evaluate our proposed approach using real-world data, and find that in several contexts, dynamic re-balancing the spatial distribution of emergency responders reduces both the average response time as well as its variance.
more »
« less
On Algorithmic Decision Procedures in Emergency Response Systems in Smart and Connected Communities
Emergency Response Management (ERM) is a critical problem faced
by communities across the globe. Despite this, it is common for ERM
systems to follow myopic decision policies in the real world. Principled approaches to aid ERM decision-making under uncertainty
have been explored but have failed to be accepted into real systems.
We identify a key issue impeding their adoption — algorithmic
approaches to emergency response focus on reactive, post-incident
dispatching actions, i.e. optimally dispatching a responder after incidents occur. However, the critical nature of emergency response
dictates that when an incident occurs, first responders always dispatch the closest available responder to the incident. We argue that
the crucial period of planning for ERM systems is not post-incident,
but between incidents. This is not a trivial planning problem — a
major challenge with dynamically balancing the spatial distribution of responders is the complexity of the problem. An orthogonal
problem in ERM systems is planning under limited communication,
which is particularly important in disaster scenarios that affect
communication networks. We address both problems by proposing
two partially decentralized multi-agent planning algorithms that
utilize heuristics and exploit the structure of the dispatch problem.
We evaluate our proposed approach using real-world data, and find
that in several contexts, dynamic re-balancing the spatial distribution of emergency responders reduces both the average response
time as well as its variance.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1905558
- PAR ID:
- 10174310
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS)
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
The problem of dispatching emergency responders to service traffic accidents, fire, distress calls and crimes plagues urban areas across the globe. While such problems have been extensively looked at, most approaches are offline. Such methodologies fail to capture the dynamically changing environments under which critical emergency response occurs, and therefore, fail to be implemented in practice. Any holistic approach towards creating a pipeline for effective emergency response must also look at other challenges that it subsumes - predicting when and where incidents happen and understanding the changing environmental dynamics. We describe a system that collectively deals with all these problems in an online manner, meaning that the models get updated with streaming data sources. We highlight why such an approach is crucial to the effectiveness of emergency response, and present an algorithmic framework that can compute promising actions for a given decision-theoretic model for responder dispatch. We argue that carefully crafted heuristic measures can balance the trade-off between computational time and the quality of solutions achieved and highlight why such an approach is more scalable and tractable than traditional approaches. We also present an online mechanism for incident prediction, as well as an approach based on recurrent neural networks for learning and predicting environmental features that affect responder dispatch. We compare our methodology with prior state-of-the-art and existing dispatch strategies in the field, which show that our approach results in a reduction in response time of responders with a drastic reduction in computational time.more » « less
-
The problem of dispatching emergency responders to service traffic accidents, fire, distress calls and crimes plagues urban areas across the globe. While such problems have been extensively looked at, most approaches are offline. Such methodologies fail to capture the dynamically changing environments under which critical emergency response occurs, and therefore, fail to be implemented in practice. Any holistic approach towards creating a pipeline for effective emergency response must also look at other challenges that it subsumes - predicting when and where incidents happen and understanding the changing environmental dynamics. We describe a system that collectively deals with all these problems in an online manner, meaning that the models get updated with streaming data sources. We highlight why such an approach is crucial to the effectiveness of emergency response, and present an algorithmic framework that can compute promising actions for a given decision-theoretic model for responder dispatch. We argue that carefully crafted heuristic measures can balance the trade-off between computational time and the quality of solutions achieved and highlight why such an approach is more scalable and tractable than traditional approaches. We also present an online mechanism for incident prediction, as well as an approach based on recurrent neural networks for learning and predicting environmental features that affect responder dispatch. We compare our methodology with prior state-of-the-art and existing dispatch strategies in the field, which show that our approach results in a reduction in response time with a drastic reduction in computational time.more » « less
-
Designing effective emergency response management (ERM) systems to respond to incidents such as road accidents is a major problem faced by communities. In addition to responding to frequent incidents each day (about 240 million emergency medical services calls and over 5 million road accidents in the US each year), these systems also support response during natural hazards. Recently, there has been a consistent interest in building decision support and optimization tools that can help emergency responders provide more efficient and effective response. This includes a number of principled subsystems that implement early incident detection, incident likelihood forecasting and strategic resource allocation and dispatch policies. In this paper, we highlight the key challenges and provide an overview of the approach developed by our team in collaboration with our community partners.more » « less
-
null (Ed.)Emergency response to incidents such as accidents, crimes, and fires is a major problem faced by communities. Emergency response management comprises of several stages and sub-problems like forecasting, resource allocation, and dispatch. The design of principled approaches to tackle each problem is necessary to create efficient emergency response management (ERM) pipelines. Over the last six years, we have worked with several first responder organizations to design ERM pipelines. In this paper, we highlight some of the challenges that we have identified and lessons that we have learned through our experience in this domain. Such challenges are particularly relevant for practitioners and researchers, and are important considerations even in the design of response strategies to mitigate disasters like floods and earthquakes.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- The DOI is not currently available.
