Towards smarter metropolitan emergency response

A core ingredient of Smart Cities is the use of emergency services both as a lens through which to monitor their ever-changing state and as a rapid response mechanism to the needs of their population. Emergency response units in particular employ diverse ubiquitous computing technologies for sensing, resilient communication, and dispatch and depend on extensive command and control infrastructure that links into the healthcare and transportation systems. In the case of ambulance services in particular, command and control centres collate medical incident, vehicle position and status data to build a realtime picture of the City. Taking the London Ambulance Service (LAS) as our case study we develop a simulation framework and introduce an enhanced routing and dispatch method that combines concurrent assignment and redeployment of units in a single algorithm. We provide evidence that our unified proactive relocation and dispatch model produces significant improvements in measured performance in terms of meeting citizen needs.