An Innovation Approach for Optimal Resource Allocation in Emergency Management

Abstract

In metropolitan regions, emergency events with different severity levels usually require multiple resources that have appropriate functionalities, money expenditure, moving velocities, etc. These resources could distribute over an extensive area with different ownerships. Solving the resource allocation problem for such an event involves complicated collaboration of multiple emergency departments under strict time constraints. Traditional resource allocation approaches usually have difficulties to efficiently find out the best resource assignment within the time limits by considering the large number of possibilities, which result in a considerable increase in fatalities. In this paper, a multiagent-based decentralised resource allocation approach using the domain transportation theory is proposed to handle a multi-task emergency event. The proposed approach is designed to effectively select appropriate resources without the global information and to concurrently generate the resource deployment plans for multiple tasks by considering the severity level of an emergency event. In the experiments, the proposed approach is tested along with other related approaches, and the experimental results indicate that the proposed approach can efficiently generate the optimal solution in terms of resource allocation time and money expenditure.