Research Presentation by Dr. Armann Ingolfsson

Fri., Apr. 11, 2014 2:00 p.m.

Location: Education Building, Room 558

The Faculty of Business Administration hosts a regular Speakers Series, including regular Research Presentations by Faculty members (October through April).

Our next presentation will be "Modeling Yellow and Red Alert durations for ambulance systems"

Presented by Dr. Armann Ingolfsson

Abstract:
Mission-critical systems like fire, police, and emergency medical services (EMS), may cause disasters if they face capacity shortages. Therefore, it is necessary to have contingency plans to quickly restore these systems when their utilization goes up. We specifically focus on EMS systems and study Red Alerts (when all ambulances are busy) and Yellow Alerts (when the number of available ambulances falls below a threshold). We model EMS systems as Erlang loss systems and model the alert periods as partial busy periods where at least some minimum number of servers are busy. We show that the first moments of partial busy period durations are insensitive to the service time distribution beyond its mean and validate our first-moment formula with Calgary EMS empirical data. Furthermore, we analyze the Laplace Transform, PDF, and higher moments of partial busy period durations for loss systems with different service time distributions. We provide a contingency plan to advice on which one of two actions that EMS systems can take to address ambulance shortages, namely (1) call new ambulances in from neighboring regions and (2) ask treatment centers to free ambulances, should be taken as a function of the current system situation.

To learn more about Dr. Ingolfsson you can visit his website.