Ambulance Emergency Response Optimization in Developing Countries

The lack of emergency medical transportation is viewed as the main barrier to the access of emergency medical care in low and middle-income countries (LMICs). In this paper, we present a robust optimization approach to optimize both the location and routing of emergency response vehicles, accounting for uncertainty in travel times and spatial demand characteristic of LMICs. We traveled to Dhaka, Bangladesh, the sixth largest and third most densely populated city in the world, to conduct field research resulting in the collection of two unique datasets that inform our approach. This data is leveraged to develop machine learning methodologies to estimate demand for emergency medical services in a LMIC setting and to predict the travel time between any two locations in the road network for different times of day and days of the week. We combine our robust optimization and machine learning frameworks with real data to provide an in-depth investigation into three policy-related questions. First, we demonstrate that outpost locations optimized for weekday rush hour lead to good performance for all times of day and days of the week. Second, we find that significant improvements in emergency response times can be achieved by re-locating a small number of outposts and that the performance of the current system could be replicated using only 30% of the resources. Lastly, we show that a fleet of small motorcycle-based ambulances has the potential to significantly outperform traditional ambulance vans. In particular, they are able to capture three times more demand while reducing the median response time by 42% due to increased routing flexibility offered by nimble vehicles on a larger road network. Our results provide practical insights for emergency response optimization that can be leveraged by hospital-based and private ambulance providers in Dhaka and other urban centers in LMICs

Power-law Behavior of High Energy String Scatterings in Compact Spaces

We calculate high energy massive scattering amplitudes of closed bosonic string compactified on the torus. We obtain infinite linear relations among high energy scattering amplitudes. For some kinematic regimes, we discover that some linear relations break down and, simultaneously, the amplitudes enhance to power-law behavior due to the space-time T-duality symmetry in the compact direction. This result is consistent with the coexistence of the linear relations and the softer exponential fall-off behavior of high energy string scattering amplitudes as we pointed out prevously. It is also reminiscent of hard (power-law) string scatterings in warped spacetime proposed by Polchinski and Strassler.Comment: 6 pages, no figure. Talk presented by Jen-Chi Lee at Europhysics Conference (EPS2007), Manchester, England, July 19-25, 2007. To be published by Journal of Physics: Conference Series

Space-time domain solutions of the wave equation by a non-singular boundary integral method and Fourier transform

The general space-time evolution of the scattering of an incident acoustic plane wave pulse by an arbitrary configuration of targets is treated by employing a recently developed non-singular boundary integral method to solve the Helmholtz equation in the frequency domain from which the fast Fourier transform is used to obtain the full space-time solution of the wave equation. The non-singular boundary integral solution can enforce the radiation boundary condition at infinity exactly and can account for multiple scattering effects at all spacings between scatterers without adverse effects on the numerical precision. More generally, the absence of singular kernels in the non-singular integral equation confers high numerical stability and precision for smaller numbers of degrees of freedom. The use of fast Fourier transform to obtain the time dependence is not constrained to discrete time steps and is particularly efficient for studying the response to different incident pulses by the same configuration of scatterers. The precision that can be attained using a smaller number of Fourier components is also quantified.Comment: 25 pages, 8 figures, 5 Multimedia files at http://www.ms.unimelb.edu.au/~dycc@unimelb/pubs_previews.htm (item S74

Inverse Optimization: Closed-form Solutions, Geometry and Goodness of fit

In classical inverse linear optimization, one assumes a given solution is a candidate to be optimal. Real data is imperfect and noisy, so there is no guarantee this assumption is satisfied. Inspired by regression, this paper presents a unified framework for cost function estimation in linear optimization comprising a general inverse optimization model and a corresponding goodness-of-fit metric. Although our inverse optimization model is nonconvex, we derive a closed-form solution and present the geometric intuition. Our goodness-of-fit metric, $\rho$, the coefficient of complementarity, has similar properties to $R^2$ from regression and is quasiconvex in the input data, leading to an intuitive geometric interpretation. While $\rho$ is computable in polynomial-time, we derive a lower bound that possesses the same properties, is tight for several important model variations, and is even easier to compute. We demonstrate the application of our framework for model estimation and evaluation in production planning and cancer therapy