Multiagent models for police resource allocation and dispatch

In this article we investigate Multi-agent simulation as a way for modeling strategies for resource allocation problems in Public Safety. The goal is to show how simulation can be used to help law enforcement authorities to evaluate, in a controlled environment, different strategies for allocating and dispatching resources, aiming at reducing both response time and the number of unattended calls. We created a Multiagent model to represent police cars that answer to emergency calls. In particular, the environment in which the agents live is a grid in which emergency occurrences appear. Random and Zipfian distributions drive the occurrence of calls. A comparison of the strategies for resource allocation in this environment shows that serving first those calls with low estimated attendance times delivers the best overall performance. However this is practically impossible since prioritization of certain crime types is necessary leading to the increase of the waiting time in the queue. Such degradation may be assimilated in real life scenarios because high priority calls are served first. Also, it is important to implement a policy of aging to avoid the cost of great degradation for low priority crimes.