Upcoming FBIT research seminars
Throughout the academic year, the (FBIT) offers a series of research seminars facilitated by its faculty members, guest speakers and research collaborators. The seminars bring fresh perspectives to the world of business and promotes in-depth discussions between experts on topics of importance. They are open to faculty, undergraduate and graduate students and alumni.
- When: Friday afternoons from 2 to 3:30 p.m.
- Where: Science Building, Room 2230
:
- March 23: , PhD, Assistant Professor: Modelling Yellow and Red Alert Durations for Ambulance Systems.
- Problem definition: We tackle two fundamental questions for emergency systems like fire, police and emergency medical service (EMS):
- How can one efficiently and effectively model high-utilization periods?
- To quickly restore capacity when utilization increases, is it better to add servers or to expedite servers?
- Academic/practical relevance: Managers of emergency systems need to understand clearly the impact of corrective actions. We focus on EMS systems and study the impact of adding and expediting ambulances (servers) on Red Alerts (when all ambulances are busy) and Yellow Alerts (when the number of available ambulances falls below a threshold).
- Methodology: To answer the first question, we use an Erlang loss model of an EMS system, and we model alert periods as partial busy periods, where the number of available ambulances is below a threshold. To answer the second question, we use the theory of absorbing Markov chains to analyze decisions about:
- Adding ambulances.
- Expediting service, with respect to two performance measures: the duration of alert periods; and the number of lost calls.
- Results: We provide recursive equations to calculate the first and second moments of partial busy period durations and we validate these formulas against EMS data from two cities. We find that the first moment (but not the higher moments) are insensitive to the shape of the service time distribution beyond its mean.
- Managerial implications: We prove it is always better to call in an ambulance than to expedite an ambulance if the time until the realization of these two actions has the same distribution. Our methods quantify the impacts of corrective actions and assist EMS dispatchers to make better decisions regarding expediting any number of ambulances versus calling in any number ambulances even if they have different arrival time distributions.
- Problem definition: We tackle two fundamental questions for emergency systems like fire, police and emergency medical service (EMS):
Note: Schedules are subject to change. Check the for updates.
