Police service district planning

Tobias Vlćek (), Knut Haase (), Malte Fliedner () and Tobias Cors ()
Additional contact information
Tobias Vlćek: Universität Hamburg
Knut Haase: Universität Hamburg
Malte Fliedner: Universität Hamburg
Tobias Cors: Universität Hamburg

OR Spectrum: Quantitative Approaches in Management, 2024, vol. 46, issue 4, No 1, 1029-1061

Abstract: Abstract We propose a new framework to address the territory design problem of emergency services in collaboration with two police authorities in Europe. Our framework serves as a strategic decision support system to assess different districting layouts, department locations, staffing decisions and dispatching strategies. First, we introduce a novel modification of the p-median problem with a combined approach to the contiguity and compactness of district layouts solvable by a commercial solver. Second, we utilize a new discrete event simulation that accounts for the variability of spatial and temporal incident patterns and driving times to evaluate the district layouts according to several criteria based upon up to 1.8 million historical incidents. Our simulation results demonstrate that our proposed district layouts can lead to a reduction of the response time by up to 14.52% while also lowering the dispatch time, the overall driving time, and the number of unanswered calls for service. Additionally, we examine the computational complexity of optimally locating district centers and analyze the more restricted problem of optimally reassigning districts to fixed district centers.

Keywords: Decision support systems; Territory design; Emergency services; Simulation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s00291-024-00745-3 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:orspec:v:46:y:2024:i:4:d:10.1007_s00291-024-00745-3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... research/journal/291

DOI: 10.1007/s00291-024-00745-3

Access Statistics for this article

OR Spectrum: Quantitative Approaches in Management is currently edited by Rainer Kolisch

More articles in OR Spectrum: Quantitative Approaches in Management from Springer, Gesellschaft für Operations Research e.V.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().