Social Fairness in Multi-Emergency Resource Management

Resource management is a well studied field. Existence of multiple emergencies in a locality, in a time overlapped manner, demands an optimal allocation of required resources to the emergencies. This is an intricate problem if the availability of resources is limited. Involvement of human lives in such situations poses a very important constraint of social fairness on the optimality criteria of allocation. Hence, these situations necessitate an allocation methodology that could allocate the requested resources to the emergencies such that even a lower criticality emergency is serviced in a socially optimal manner. In this research, an emergency management tool is developed that models the problem as a game theoretic framework in which the crisis events are modeled as the players, the emergency response centers as the resource locations with the possible emergency unit allocations as strategies. The pay-off is modeled as a function of the criticality of the event and the anticipated response times. A single step, non-cooperative, normal form game is formulated and a Nash equilibrium based solution methodology is implemented to provide fair allocation of resources to the emergencies. Experimental results are presented to illustrate the efficacy of the proposed methodology and metrics are derived to quantify the fairness of the solution. A regression analysis is performed to establish the statistical significance of the results.