Title:

Modeling the Impact of Community First Responders

Body: 

Patient survival from out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) can be improved by augmenting traditional ambulance response with the dispatch of community first responders (volunteers) who are alerted via an app. How many volunteers are needed, from where should volunteers be recruited, and how should they be dispatched? We use a combination of Poisson point process modeling and convex optimization to address the first two questions; the right areas from which to recruit are not always obvious, because volunteers recruited from one area may spend time in various areas across a city. We use a combination of dynamic programming and decision trees to answer the last question, balancing the goal of a fast response to the current patient with the need to avoid disengagement of volunteers that arises when multiple volunteers respond. A case study for Auckland, New Zealand demonstrates the ideas.

 This is joint work with Pieter van den Berg, Océane Fourmentraux, Caroline Jagtenberg, and Hemeng (Maggie) Li

Bio:

Professor Shane G. Henderson holds the Charles W. Lake, Jr. Chair in Productivity in the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering (ORIE) at Cornell University. His research interests include discrete-event simulation, simulation optimization, emergency services planning and transportation. He is the editor in chief of the open-access journal Stochastic Systems. He is an INFORMS Fellow and a co-recipient of the INFORMS Wagner Prize for his work on bike-sharing programs. He has served as Director of the School of ORIE, as chair of the INFORMS Applied Probability Society, and as simulation area editor for Operations Research. He has previously held positions in the Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan and the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Auckland. He likes cats, climbing walls, biking, Harry Potter and being a Dad.