Two Effective Strategies to Support Cross-Organization Emergency Resource Allocation Optimization

Abstract

Cross-organization emergency resource allocation optimization problem is essential to guarantee a successful emergency disposal, and it has become a research focus of modern emergency management. Generally speaking, there are two possible types of resource allocation scenarios: (1) if the emergency resources are overallocated, on the one hand, parallel execution of independent emergency activities can be supported and the emergency disposal time is reduced; on the other hand, too many idle resources may cause low resource utilization rate, high scheduling overhead, and high cost; and (2) if emergency resources are underallocated, this may lead to resource conflicts and the need for some emergency activities to wait for others to complete, and finally the emergency disposal time may increase. Therefore, reasonable emergency resource allocation strategies are highly desired. To the best of our knowledge, there is no formal approach to support the cross-organization emergency resource allocation issue. To handle this problem, we propose a two-layered framework to facilitate the allocation of limited emergency resources to meet its time constraints with high efficiency. More specifically, a kind of Petri net extended with time, resource, and message information, denoted as CE-net, is presented to model cross-organization emergency response processes. Based on the obtained CE-net, the minimum resource requirements are obtained with corresponding algorithms. Then, Minimum Execution Time (MET) strategy and Minimum Resource Consumption (MRC) strategy with their corresponding estimated execution intervals are introduced to facilitate the stakeholder to determine which strategy is suitable according to the timing requirements. A cross-organization fire emergency case is applied to validate the proposed approaches throughout the whole paper.