Methodology to manage priority queues of casualties in a dynamic disaster environment

In this work we have considered a dynamic disaster environment where an earthquake has struck and thousands of casualties are to be attended to. Information regarding casualties and road conditions comes in from many sources and is fused at a fusion center. Based on this fused data, casualties are classified into three classes: severe, moderate and mild. Ambulances are dispatched from a hospital location to a casualty pick-up location and then back to a hospital. The arrivals of the three priority classes are assumed to be from independent Poisson streams and service times are assumed to be exponentially distributed. Two types of queue control are considered for this priority system, one based on a server cutoff and the other based on a queue-length cutoff. Two dispatch policies-patient-initiated and ambulance-initiated-are used to determine which available ambulance should be sent.