Collaborative Research: Priority Dispatching of Patients in the Aftermath of a Mass-Casualty Event

这笔赠款提供资金，用于制定简单但有效的决策规则，以便在发生大规模伤亡事件后将稀缺资源(如救护车和手术室)分配给病人。问题的描述基于SARC分流方法(STM)的模型，该模型通过求解一个线性规划来实时获得一个好的病人分配策略。这项研究将通过引入在实践中高度相关的随机组件，并将其置于动态规划框架中，以更好地理解动态患者分诊的决策，从而显著扩展STM模型。该模型不是用来实时获得解的，而是用来研究最优或接近最优策略的结构特征，并在最优策略无法表征或不容易实施时开发启发式方法。该研究将开发一个综合的模拟模型，用于测试所提出的政策和指南的性能。如果成功，这项研究将为应急响应社区重新努力制定有效的应急响应政策提供科学支持。这项工作的主要目标是确定有效但又简单的规则，以便使其对从业者更具吸引力。这项研究将确定易于在该领域采用的广泛指导方针。这些准则基本上将根据诸如大约总伤亡人数等容易观察到的衡量标准来确定要使用的优先次序政策的类型。这项拟议的工作也将有助于运筹学中的经典作业调度文献，因为它涉及到对在许多不同环境下出现的作业调度问题的新公式的分析。

This grant provides funding for the development of simple but effective decision rules for allocating scarce resources (such as ambulances and operating rooms) to patients in the aftermath of mass-casualty incidents. The problem formulations are based on the model of Sacco Triage Method (STM), which was proposed to obtain a good patient allocation policy in real-time by solving a linear program. This research will significantly expand on the model of STM by introducing stochastic components that are highly relevant in practice and also by placing it within a dynamic programming framework for a better understanding of decisions for dynamic patient triage. Instead of using the model to obtain a solution in real time, it will be used to investigate structural characteristics of optimal or near-optimal policies and also to develop heuristic methods when optimal policies cannot be characterized or are not easy to implement. A comprehensive simulation model will be developed, which will be used in testing the performances of the proposed policies and guidelines.If successful, this research will provide scientific support for the emergency response community in their revived effort of developing effective emergency response policies. The main objective of this work is to identify effective but also simple rules so as to make them more appealing for practitioners. The research will identify broad guidelines that can be easily adopted in the field. These guidelines will essentially determine the type of the prioritization policy to be used depending on easily observable measures such as the approximate total number of casualties. The proposed work will also contribute to the classical job scheduling literature in Operations Research since it involves the analysis of a novel formulation for a job scheduling problem that arises in many different settings.