EURO 2025 Leeds
Abstract Submission

1856. Efficient and equitable transportation of casualties by Online Optimization in mass casualty incidents

Invited abstract in session WC-55: Strategic Facility Location and Inventory Prepositioning, stream Humanitarian Operations.

Wednesday, 12:30-14:00
Room: Liberty 1.09

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Fatemeh Zare Bidaki
Business administration, Koc university
2. Davood Shiri
Operations Management and Decision Sciences, The University of Sheffield
3. Sibel Salman
Industrial Engineering, Koc University

Abstract

Mass casualty incidents (MCI) trigger a devastating impact on society and overwhelm emergency response
systems. Following an MCI, a large number of victims suffer injuries of varying severity, each requiring
urgent medical attention. Efficient and well-prioritized logistical operations are crucial to ensuring timely
rescue and resource allocation and minimizing the immediate and long-term effects of MCIs. In this study,
we propose an online optimization framework to address the heterogeneous ambulance routing problem
(ARP) in urban areas affected by MCIs. Our Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model incorpo
rate multiple triage levels and accounts for uncertainties related to the number of recovered victims from
debris, as well as potential changes in their survival status during post-disaster scenarios with the objective
of maximizing the expected number of survivors. Recognizing these uncertainties, our proposed online opti
mization algorithm adjusts rescue operations in real-time based on incrementally learned incoming data. We
assess the effectiveness of our online solutions by comparing them with offline model results derived from
assuming perfect information. We also investigate several fairness approaches in our framework to promote
healthcare equity. Ultimately, we validate our proposed approaches through computational experiments over
real-world datasets.

Keywords

Status: accepted

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