Next-Generation Emergency Response Network Design through Drone-Bystander-Ambulance Coordination

Dr. Lavanya Marla
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Abstract: Drones have demonstrated potential to improve response to time-sensitive emergencies, particularly in cities where ambulance response is impacted highly by traffic. We focus on out-of-hospital cardiac arrests (OHCAs), which kill over 300,000 individuals in the US annually. Drones can facilitate early medical intervention by delivering an automated external defibrillator (AED) before ambulance arrival, but they require community response in the form of willing bystanders to apply the AED. Past work on designing drone-enabled AED networks assumes that community response is always forthcoming, although historical bystander participation is in fact low. We introduce the concept of explicitly capturing community response through joint location-queuing models and propose a modeling framework to simultaneously optimize a drone-bystander-ambulance network for OHCA response. Service can be achieved by either an ambulance alone; or by the drone-delivered AED together with a bystander, complemented by a slower-arriving ambulance. We formulate this problem as a mixed-integer-linear program and use the solution structure to develop an accurate and highly scalable heuristic algorithm. We demonstrate our approach on a case study with three cities around Toronto, Canada. Operationally, the drone-bystander-ambulance network is more effective in regions with limited ambulance resources or low ambulance availability.

Bio: Lavanya Marla is an Associate Professor in Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests are in robust and dynamic decision-making for large-scale networks subject to operating stochasticity. Her research builds advanced resource allocation tools for these systems by bridging the strengths of data-driven optimization, statistics, simulation and artificial intelligence. Application areas of interest include aviation planning, operations and pricing; logistics, emergency medical services, and shared transportation systems.

She is a founding organizer of AI-SCORE, the Artificial Intelligence School for Operations Research Education that unveiled in May 2024, and an Amazon Scholar. Her work has been recognized through multiple awards including the prestigious Center for Advanced Study award from the University of Illinois, IISE Outstanding Innovation in Service Systems award, a semi-finalist at the INFORMS Innovative Applications in Analytics Award, Honorable mention for the Anna Valicek award from AGIFORS, KDD Startup Research award, and multiple best paper awards. Her research is funded by the US National Science Foundation, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Transportation, the US-India Educational Foundation, and multiple industry grants. Prior to the University of Illinois, she was a Systems Scientist with the Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University. She earned her PhD and dual Masters degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her Bachelors degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras.