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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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OR Colloquium
TITLE: Bounding the Performance of Ambulance Deployment Policies
SPEAKER: Shane Henderson
ABSTRACT:
Ambulance organizations everywhere face increasing call volumes, increasing traffic congestion, and shrinking budgets. To keep response times small, many 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 review methods for designing SSM policies, and methods for bounding what is achievable with any deployment policy. These bounds are useful in determining whether methods other than SSM need to be employed to achieve contractual targets for response times, and for helping determine when to stop looking for SSM improvements because policies are near optimal. Joint work with Matt Maxwell, Chaoxu Tong and Huseyin Topaloglu.
Bio: Shane G. Henderson is a professor in the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering at Cornell University. He received his PhD from Stanford University in 1997, and has held academic 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. His research interests include discrete-event simulation, simulation optimization, and emergency-services planning. He is the current chair of the INFORMS Applied Probability Society, the past simulation area editor for Operations Research, and an associate editor for both Management Science and Stochastic Systems.
