Joint initial dispatching of official responders and registered volunteers during catastrophic mass-casualty incidents

Abstract

A catastrophic mass-casualty incident results in a high number of casualties and demands the sudden mobilization of emergency medical services in a short while. It typically overwhelms the capacity of official first responders from the local emergency response system. With the advancement of GPS technology to map real-time positions, registered volunteers in the community could be a valuable addition to complement the official resources. In this paper, we propose an optimization model to aid in the initial dispatch of official responders and registered volunteers. We discuss how this model can be integrated with the existing registered volunteer management tools (e.g., databases and smart phone applications) to generate an upgraded emergency responder dispatching workflow for field practices. We model uncertainty in model parameters through different scenarios. Our objective is to maximize both the expected number of served victims across all scenarios and the minimum (worst-case) percentage of served victims among all scenarios. Based on a hypothetical case study of a mass-casualty incident in New York City, we illustrate how our model could increase emergency response outcomes by leveraging currently unutilized registered volunteers as emergency response resources.