CAREER: Extreme Weather Events and Emergency Medical Services: A Discrete 0ptimization Modeling Framework

该学院早期职业发展(Career)计划奖调查如何通过在其社会背景下考虑基本决策问题来重新制定和重新构建具有相当社会相关性的重要服务系统模型。这一职业规划的动机是紧急医疗服务(EMS)系统中重要的、及时的资源分配问题，即如何在极端天气事件期间对医疗紧急情况提供协调的EMS响应，从而整合迄今在文献中单独讨论的两种类型的减灾问题。特别是，这项研究调查了如何向地理上分散的客户(患者)最佳地调度服务器(医疗单元)，以及在正常和极端天气事件期间调度策略如何变化。紧急医疗调度协议通常是为在正常天气条件下运行的系统设计的。一般来说，对于在极端天气条件下运行的系统，调度协议可能会如何更改，目前几乎没有指导意见。研究计划的中心挑战是重新表述和重组新的硬离散优化问题，这些问题捕捉到服务系统周围的社会背景，并通过探索新的算法和启发式方法以及通过表征模型的结构属性来求解离散优化模型。这个项目中开发的离散优化模型提供了新的公式，通过研究EMS系统的特殊需求来重新表述和重组新的问题类别。这些新的模型和算法可以用来为EMS系统的设计和运行提供基本的见解，以应对极端天气事件期间出现的医疗紧急情况。具有挑战性的扩展研究如何同时定位和调度医疗单位，并使用委托代理问题模型研究紧急医疗调度的博弈论方面。教育部分的核心挑战是创建一系列教学和外联活动，通过外联教育公共安全领导人，创建一系列关于将先进分析工具应用于风险和危险应用的播客，利用研究作为利用社交网络工具(博客、Facebook和Twitter)进行外联的工具，开发一门关于国土安全和紧急管理的数学模型的课程，并指导学生。通过将研究模式纳入外展活动和其他教育活动，并利用外展和教育部分更好地为研究模式提供信息，将实现研究和教育部分之间的整合。这一项目的更广泛影响旨在将对重大风险和危险问题的研究与学习结合起来，应用于紧急医疗服务。研究部分产生了实时分配稀缺EMS资源的新政策，这有可能改变正常和极端天气事件期间EMS资源的分配方式。与EMS社区合作伙伴的协作安排为该项目提供了丰富的真实世界数据，该社区合作伙伴将成为该研究的直接受益者。教育部分创建了一系列针对公共安全领导人和使用在线社交网络工具的外联活动。教育和推广活动综合并反馈到研究活动中。该项目的一个积极影响是向公共安全领导人和调查员领域以外的学生传播知识。最后，研究成果、教育材料和外展活动计划将广泛传播给研究人员、从业者和整个社会。

This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program award investigates how to reformulate and reframe important service system models that have considerable social relevance by considering the fundamental decision issues within their social context. This career plan is motivated by important, timely resource allocation problems in emergency medical service (EMS) systems, namely, how to provide a coordinated EMS response to medical emergencies during extreme weather events, thus integrating two types of hazard mitigation problems that have been addressed separately in the literature thus far. In particular, this research investigates how to optimally dispatch servers (medical units) to geographically dispersed customers (patients) as well as how dispatching policies change during normal and extreme weather events. Emergency medical dispatching protocols are typically designed for systems operating under normal weather conditions. In general, little guidance exists for how dispatching protocols may change for systems operating under extreme weather conditions. The central challenges of the research program are to reformulate and reframe new classes of hard discrete optimization problems that capture the social context surrounding service systems and to solve the discrete optimization models by exploring new algorithms and heuristics as well as by characterizing the structural properties of the models. The discrete optimization models developed in this project provide novel formulations that reformulate and reframe new classes of problems by investigating the particular demands of EMS systems. These new models and algorithms can be used to provide fundamental insights into the design and operation of EMS systems in response to medical emergencies that arise during extreme weather events. Challenging extensions investigate how to simultaneously locate and dispatch medical units and investigate game-theoretic aspects of emergency medical dispatch using principal agent problem models. The central challenges of the educational component are to create a portfolio of teaching and outreach activities that educates public safety leaders through outreach, to create a series of podcasts about applying advanced analytical tools to risk and hazard applications, to use the research as a vehicle for outreach using social networking tools (blogs, FaceBook, and Twitter), to develop a course on mathematical models for homeland security and emergency management, and to mentor students. Integration between the research and educational components will be achieved by including the research models in the outreach and other educational activities and by using the outreach and educational component to better inform the research models.The broader impacts of this project are aimed at integrating research with teaching and learning on important risk and hazard problems with application to emergency medical services. The research component leads to new policies for allocating scarce EMS resources in real-time, which have the potential to transform how EMS resources are allocated during normal and extreme weather events. A collaborative arrangement with an EMS community partner provides a wealth of real-world data for this project, and this community partner will be the direct beneficiary of this research. The educational component creates a portfolio of outreach activities that are targeted at public safety leaders and that use online social networking tools. The educational and outreach activities synthesize and feed back into the research activities. A positive impact of this project is the transmission of knowledge to public safety leaders and to students outside of the investigator's field. Finally, research results, educational materials, and outreach activities programs will be broadly disseminated to researchers, practitioners, and to society at large.