Tobias Andersson Granberg

Emergency Response in Rural Areas

In this study, security and safety in rural parts of Sweden are investigated. New ways of organizing for efficient response can be found in the extended collaboration between societal sectors and i ...

Scheduling de-icing vehicles within airport logistics: a heuristic algorithm and performance evaluation

Most delays in the air transport occur at the airport. A particular reason is the complexity of managing the large number of supporting flows in airport logistics. We consider the optimisation problem of scheduling de-icing vehicles that is one of the key supporting logistic flows in the turn-around process of aircraft. The objective is to minimise the delay of flights due to de-icing, and the travel distance of the de-icing vehicles. We study the complexity of the problem, and develop a solution algorithm using greedy randomised adaptive search. A case study of real-life data from Stockholm Arlanda Airport shows that optimised schedule leads to significantly better performance in comparison to intuitive and simple scheduling strategies. The benefit of optimisation in reducing the waiting time for de-icing is further demonstrated via dynamic simulations.

New collaborations in daily emergency response: Applying cost-benefit analysis to new first response initiatives in the Swedish fire and rescue service

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyse costs and benefits from new collaborations in daily emergency response and to demonstrate how cost-benefit analysis (CBA) can be used for evaluating effects from these kinds of collaborations. Design/methodology/approach – CBA is used to evaluate two collaborations. The cases are: security officers that respond to fire and rescue service (FRS) calls; and home care nurses that assist the FRSs when they respond to urgent medical calls. Interviews, public documents and incident reports have been used as sources of data. Findings – Most costs are relatively straightforward to estimate. More difficult to estimate are the turn-out costs, including the services that cannot be performed when the new actors take on new assignments. One important benefit from these kinds of collaborations is reduced response time. Other benefits include increased situational awareness and improved preventive work in Case 1, as well as improved working conditions for the traditional ...

Strategic ambulance location for heterogeneous regions

Providing Emergency Medical Services (EMS) is a key function of society. To achieve high quality EMS, planning is of vital importance. An important strategic and tactical problem is the location of ambulance stations and the allocation of ambulances to these stations. This paper presents a new mixed integer model for this problem especially suitable for regions with heterogeneous demand and multiple performance measures. The model decides on the location/allocation of stations/ambulances, calculates the service and arrival rates for each station and the probabilities that a call is served by a particular station. The model is tested on a combined urban and rural area in Norway with multiple performance measures. Compared with the current solution for the area, the best solution from the model has a higher expected performance on each of the performance measures used.

Automatic Design of Aircraft Arrival Routes with Limited Turning Angle

We present an application of Integer Programming to the design of arrival routes for aircraft in a Terminal Maneuvering Area (TMA). We generate operationally feasible merge trees of curvature-const ...

Convex sectorization—A novel integer programming approach

We present a MIP-based airspace sectorization framework for Terminal Maneuvering Areas that can enforce convex sectors. The approach integrates an airspace complexity representation, and the resulting sectorizations have a balanced taskload. We present results for Stockholm TMA; and compare our results to convex sectorizations obtained by enumerating all possible topologies for a given number of sectors.

Supporting Dispatch Decisions for the Fire and Rescue Services

Decision support tools for efficient dispatching of fire and rescue resources are developed and evaluated. The tools can give suggestions about which resources to dispatch to new accidents, and help the decision makers in evaluating the current preparedness for handling future accidents. The tools are evaluated using simulation game based experiments, with players from the fire and rescue services. The results indicate that the tools can help the fire and rescue services in identifying the closest resources to new accidents, and to select resources that preserve the preparedness in the area. However, the results also indicate that there is a risk that the tools increase the decision time.

Preparedness Measures for Emergency and Disaster Response

Quantitative preparedness measures can be used to calculate the level of preparedness for handling disasters or emergencies. They are useful for evaluating plans and preparations, and for comparing areas and organizations with each other. This chapter gives an introduction to the construction and use of such measures, and proposes a general methodology that can be applied when developing them. The methodology is exemplified on two case studies, the first concerning disaster preparedness, and the second daily events. In the first case study, a hurricane disaster risk index is developed to compare the preparedness for handling hurricanes in different counties. The second case study describes the development and validation of a preparedness measure for emergency medical services, which is used to support decisions about ambulance dispatch and relocation.