G.M. (Giulia Melanie) Montagna

Reducing emergency response times is of paramount importance, and traditional emergency services can be helped by volunteers that are dispatched via a smartphone app. Such community first responder (CFR) systems are already commonly used to send resuscitation-trained volunteers to cardiac arrest patients, and may in the near future also be used for other emergencies. In this unique project you work closely with CFR systems, ambulance providers, firefighters, red cross and others.

In this PhD project you will develop methodologies and algorithms to ensure CFR systems operate in the most efficient and effective way. This includes

• modeling the effectiveness of such systems in relation to the number of volunteers
• the spatial optimization of where to recruit volunteers
• developing alerting strategies: which volunteers should get an alert? Should we alert many immediately, or build in a time lag?
• How to best spend a training budget to improve the skills of some of the existing volunteers
• optimal volunteer task diversification: which volunteers do you instruct to travel directly to the incident and which ones need to pick up equipment first?

In the models you will develop, stochasticity plays an important role, as both volunteer locations and whether or not they will accept their task are uncertain. Techniques may include mathematical optimization, simulation and machine learning.

Faculty to contact: Dr. Pieter van den Berg