First Friday Webinar – Optimizing emergency response systems

Emergency response systems, e.g. fire and rescue services and emergency medical services, have been a popular area of study for operational researchers. However, unlike for the airline industry for instance, there do not exist an abundance of success stories, where advanced operational research models and methods have been implemented in practice. In this talk, I’ll present a few emergency response problems, including the classical fire station location problem, ambulance dispatching and relocation, and volunteer management, where OR have been used in practice. I will also discuss some of the challenges with practical implementations, and the trade-off between working on something that is useful in practice, and something that can be published in an OR journal.

EWG POR webinars organisers: Sofiane Oussedik (IBM), Joaquim Gromicho (ORTEC), Patrick Schittekat (SINTEF), Gavin Bell (Optimeering), Adisa Mujezinovic