In providing emergency services, city and county agencies are faced with a number of complex logistical challenges. These include determining the locational configurations of stations and equipment, establishing dispatching policies and routing information, and developing appropriate equipment move-up policies. In addressing these challenges, emergency service agencies must consider two difficult goals: first, because of the importance of the service, it is necessary to position and dispatch vehicles in such a manner that any call requiring service may be responded to both promptly and reliably; second, because of budget constraints, the service must be provided in the most cost-effective manner possible. To assist agencies in addressing these two critical needs, ISERA Group proposes to develop a comprehensive Decision Support System (DSS) for the design and evaluation of emergency services. The DSS will provide simulation strategies for testing existing or proposed station and equipment configurations and dispatching and move-up policies. To complement such functionality, the proposed DSS will support protocols for communication with existing geographical information systems (GIS) and computer-aided dispatching (CAD) systems.
