KEYNOTE SPEAKER

Where Should Ambulances be Stationed?

Prof. Shane G. Henderson
Cornell University, USA

Abstract

Ambulance organizations all around the world are facing increasing call volumes, increasing traffic congestion, and shrinking budgets. To keep response times small, many are looking to employ some kind of system-status management (SSM). SSM is the practice of real-time control of the ambulance fleet, using Global Positioning System (GPS) units on the ambulances to track location, and information from the ambulance crews to track status. Available ambulances are carefully stationed to ensure coverage, while not requiring too many moves of the ambulance crews. I'll describe my work to help make the location decisions, using a combination of statistics to model inputs, approximate dynamic programming to make stationing decisions in real time, simulation optimization to "tune" the approximate dynamic programming algorithm and bounding techniques to determine what response times might be achievable in a given city.
Joint work with: Matt Maxwell, Matt McLean, Mateo Restrepo, Brad Westgate, David Matteson, Huseyin Topaloglu, Dawn Woodard
Thanks to: The Optima Corporation, National Science Foundation

Biography of the Keynote Speaker

Shane G. Henderson is a professor in, and past director of, the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering at Cornell University. He has previously held positions in Industrial and Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan and in Engineering Science at the University of Auckland. His research interests include discrete-event simulation and simulation optimization, with an emphasis on applications in the emergency services. He has also worked on radiation therapy planning for cancer treatment, yacht design for match racing in the America's Cup, and in a kind of technical hobby he has even advised students in analyzing aspects of the game of Monopoly! He is the simulation area editor for Operations Research, the current chair of the INFORMS Applied Probability Society, and co-edited both the "Handbook of Simulation" (Elsevier, 2006) and the Proceedings of the 2007 Winter Simulation Conference.