Multi-modal Casualty Transportation in a Mass Casualty Incident
Florentina Hager
Ph.D. Candidate, IEBIS Department, University of Twente.
The aftermath of a disaster can result in a high number of casualties requiring medical care within a short time frame. Often, due to insufficient local capacities a significant percentage of these casualties must be transported to hospitals or other suitable care facilities. Various mass transportation modes, such as busses, ships, or trains, could provide an efficient way of quickly transporting casualties to available medical treatment centres outside of the disaster area.
The inclusion of diverse (mass) transportation modes, however, gives rise to additional logistical complexities. In most cases, entry points to rail-based, air-based or water-based modes of transport do not coincide with the disaster area. As a result, casualties need to transfer between different transportation modes. Moreover, to efficiently use the capacities of mass transportation modes, the casualties’ trajectories must be coordinated both timewise and geographically.
To account for these complexities, we focus on the development of models that integrate various (mass) transportation modes. Our aim is to support decision-makers and thus improve casualty management in future disasters.
After completing her bachelor’s and master’s degree at the University of Graz in Austria with stays abroad at the Université Paris Nanterre and University of Twente, Florentina began her Ph.D. in May 2022 at the TU Darmstadt. In June 2023, she then officially transferred to the University of Twente. Her research is centred on addressing logistical challenges in disaster settings, with a special focus on casualty management.
Spell – Supporting Emergency Services With OR- And AIbased Approaches
Dr. Melanie Reuter-Oppermann
Assistant Professor, IEBIS Department, University of Twente.
Almost all emergency medical service (EMS) systems worldwide face an increasing cost pressure often accompanied with a shortage of staff and other necessary resources as well as issue of long distances to sparsely populated areas. This means that adequate response times for all patients, 24 /7, and throughout all regions are difficult or even impossible to ensure. An efficient use of resources is crucial, including those available as pre-EMS services, e.g. first responders. Operations research (OR) and artificial intelligence (AI) approaches can support that. Unfortunately, the German EMS system falls short in terms of digitalisation in general and the use of well-grounded methods for managing and planning their logistics and processes. The research project SPELL funded by the German Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy aims at developing a platform that provides decision support to coordination centres on a daily bases, but also in case of a crisis or (natural) disaster. The platform will offer various OR- and AI-based services including intelligent dashboards, chatbots as well as forecasting, optimisation and simulation approaches for addressing strategical, tactical and operational problems. With this platform, we hope to overcome some of the determined barriers for improvements of the EMS systems. In this talk, we address recent topics in EMS logistics from a practical and a research perspective and discuss different planning problems including the location of ambulances and the scheduling of patient transports and how we have integrated them into the SPELL platform.
Melanie is Assistant Professor for Operations Research in Healthcare at the University of Twente. She received her PhD in Operations Research from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and spent her PostDoc at the Technical University of Darmstadt. She is a joint coordinator of the EURO working group ORAHS and speaker of the scientific advisory board of the DGRe. Her main research interests are OR and IS for emergency services/logistics and crisis management, as well as other areas in healthcare, e.g. blood logistics or primary care.
Dr. Melanie Reuter-Oppermann
Assistant Professor, IEBIS Department, University of Twente.
Almost all emergency medical service (EMS) systems worldwide face an increasing cost pressure often accompanied with a shortage of staff and other necessary resources as well as issue of long distances to sparsely populated areas. This means that adequate response times for all patients, 24 /7, and throughout all regions are difficult or even impossible to ensure. An efficient use of resources is crucial, including those available as pre-EMS services, e.g. first responders. Operations research (OR) and artificial intelligence (AI) approaches can support that. Unfortunately, the German EMS system falls short in terms of digitalisation in general and the use of well-grounded methods for managing and planning their logistics and processes. The research project SPELL funded by the German Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy aims at developing a platform that provides decision support to coordination centres on a daily bases, but also in case of a crisis or (natural) disaster. The platform will offer various OR- and AI-based services including intelligent dashboards, chatbots as well as forecasting, optimisation and simulation approaches for addressing strategical, tactical and operational problems. With this platform, we hope to overcome some of the determined barriers for improvements of the EMS systems. In this talk, we address recent topics in EMS logistics from a practical and a research perspective and discuss different planning problems including the location of ambulances and the scheduling of patient transports and how we have integrated them into the SPELL platform.
Melanie is Assistant Professor for Operations Research in Healthcare at the University of Twente. She received her PhD in Operations Research from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and spent her PostDoc at the Technical University of Darmstadt. She is a joint coordinator of the EURO working group ORAHS and speaker of the scientific advisory board of the DGRe. Her main research interests are OR and IS for emergency services/logistics and crisis management, as well as other areas in healthcare, e.g. blood logistics or primary care.