Journal of the Operational Rearch Society(2009)60,S126--S139©2009Operational Rearch Society Ltd.All rights rerved.
0160-5682/09
/jors/ Fifty years of operational rearch and emergency respon
NC Simpson∗and PG Hancock
University at Buffalo,Buffalo,NY,USA
Over the past50years,a wealth of applications has resulted from rearchers turning their attention to operations such asfire suppression,law enforcement and ambulance rvices.The1970s might even be argued
as the‘golden age’of this particular effort,producing many of the minal works infire station location planning,unit assignment and ambulance queuing models.Such efforts naturally continue through to th
e prent,but with a focus shifting away from earlier contexts of established urban emergency rvice systems. Simultaneously,current evidence from thefield suggests that far more work remains.In this paper,we reviewconjuring
the operational rearch(OR)foundation in emergency respon so far,highlighting the fact that most of what
has been accomplished address the well-structured problems of emergency rvices.This,in turn,offers
an explanation for some paradoxical challenges from thefield:most of emergency respon itlf is mi-structured,at best.While OR has traditionally focud on the management of an organization,emergency respon ultimately requires the management of disorganization,suggesting an important OR growth area for
the next50years.
Journal of the Operational Rearch Society(2009)60,S126–S139.doi:10.1057/jors.2009.3
Keywords:emergency respon;emergency rvices;modelling
Introduction
Born of the logistics of World War II,it is hardly surprising to find a rich history of operational rearch(OR)in the context of emergency respon and emergency rvices.Indeed,the developments in this particular ctor often reflect the general issues and trends of OR.Emergency respon organizations such asfire,police and ambulance rvices belong almost exclusively to the public ctor,which has itlf been charac-terized as‘the cradle’of OR(Papageorgiou,1994).Further-more,the body of published OR work on emergency respon has shifted focus over time,reflecting not only the evolution of emergency rvices,but likewi the advancing scope of OR.Finally,examining the shifts brings us to the prent day,where the remaining unmet needs of emergency rvices strongly suggest a growth area for OR over the next few decades.
galilio
Three of the earliest mainstream OR journal articles focud on emergency respon are thefire station location planning studies of Valinsky(1955)and Hogg(1968)and the ambulance rvice simulation study of Savas(1969).The articles,appearing in Operations Rearch,Operational Rearch Quarterly and Management Science,respectively, can be argued as archetypes for a foundational stream of rearch that would soon follow.The next ction of this Correspondence:N Simpson,Department of Operations Management &Strategy,School of Management,University of Buf
falo,351Jacobs Management Center,Buffalo,NY.paper describes the asmbly of a convenience sample of 361emergency respon-related OR articles(henceforth referred to as EOR),to characterize that stream of rearch and its sub-currents from1965to2007.In the following two ctions,this body of work is explored in greater detail in two phas,starting with an earlier definitive foundation of literature modelling and improving designed urban emer-gency rvices,and then proceeding to a higher volume era of broader scope but fewer synergistic relationships among studies.This brings the discussion to a summary of problems yet to be fully addresd by the substantial body of EOR publications available in the prent time,concluding with a suggested direction for OR innovation over the next50years. While both OR and its subt EOR began in the context of improving the performance of organized environments,emer-gencies by definition reprent a disruption of such designs, providing a promising new domain for future work:the theoretical esnce and practical needs of disorganizations. Emergencies and OR:an overview of1965–2007 Convenience sampling methodology
Recent reflections on EOR have typically focud on a particular ctor within thefield of emergency respon.For example,Green and Kolesar(2004)discuss previous OR work within the context of large urban emergency rvice systems and‘habitual emergencies’,while Altay and Green (2006)review work related to large-scale disasters and
NC Simpson and PG Hancock—Fifty years of operational rearch S127 Table1Focus categories and component title keywords ud in construction of emergency respon rearchtbd
articles convenience sample
Focus Category
Urban Services Disaster Services Hazard Specific General Emergency
少儿英语口语keywords keywords keywords keyword
Fire Disaster Hurricane/Typhoon Emergency
Police Evacuation Terrorism/Terrorist
Patrol Rescue Epidemic/Pandemic
Ambulance Flood/Tsunami
EMS Earthquake
Wildfire1
Total articles
in sample
1206472105
1The majority of wildfire-related articles were identified by the keyword query‘fire’,and manually re-classified as wildfire upon review of the article.
Wright et al(2006)summarize OR applications associated with a specific type of hazard.The purpo of this study is to examine EOR as a whole,as all the sub-currents of concern are interrelated.To pursue this objective,361 journal articles were gathered into a single convenience sample of published EOR work.Candidates for this sample werefirst identified by querying the combined citation index databas of Web of Science for keywords in the titles of all journal articles in the management science/operations rearch subject area published between1965and2007. Each keyword was mapped to one of four focus areas:Urban Services,Disaster Services,Specific Hazards and General Emergency,as detailed in Table1.The resulting collection of articles wasfirst reviewed to eliminate double-entries created by titles containing two or more keywords;36instances of double-entries and three instances of triple entries were resolved by assigning the article to the most specifi
c of the keywords,as the general term‘emergency’was frequently ud in conjunction with a keyword such as‘ambulance’or‘flood’.The resulting group was then reviewed again to ascertain whether the article identified by a keyword in its title did indeed reprent emergency respon rearch in that focus area.Fifteen articles were re-assigned focus areas (moving from Urban Services to Specific Hazards)and75 articles were deleted from the sample as not applicable to emergency respon.The combined result of the steps identified a total of361articles for the EOR convenience sample,and the resulting count of articles in each of the focus areas appears in Table1.
The purpo of this sampling procedure is not to define the t of absolutely all EOR work available in the litera-ture between1965and2007,as arching for keywords in titles across only tho journals tracked by Web of Science®will not fully populate such a group.Rather,the purpo of the convenience sampling process is to systematically iden-tify a sufficient proportion of the overall body of published knowledge in this ctor such that trends in volume,focus or outlet might become apparent.The four focus categories are intuitive groupings bad on both obrvation of the data and synthesis of previous studies.The Urban Services group is intended to collect tho articles dedicated to emergency respon in the context of established municipal rvices such asfire and police departments and who compri the focus of Green and Kolesar(2004),who note a drop in suc
h publi-cations after1989.Urban Services imply emergencies which can be resolved largely by the resources of a single organi-zation,whereas the Disaster Services and Specific Hazards are intended to gather references to large-scale emergency respon,such as surveyed recently by Altay and Green (2006).Finally,the General Emergency group is kept as an open category to collect any EOR work that did not feature any of the specific associated keywords,for subquent study. EOR activity across time
Figure1displays the distribution of published work in the convenience sample along the timeline of1965–2007.Clearly, publication of EOR articles has en an increa in recent years;furthermore,the peak year in the time ries is the most recent year of2007,in which the combined total of40papers published is more than double any other year in the ries with the exception of2001.Whether the distinct variations in total annual volume are motivated by related events is unclear,as can be en by the lection of high-profile incidents likewi indicated along the Figure1timeline.While it is intuitive to assume that peaks in EOR publications could reprent rearch motivated by needs revealed during some large-scale incident a few years prior,publications in the convenience sample do not necessarily reference any distinct motivating incidents,and even fewer model or analy particular events. As an example,only a third of the40pap
ers appearing in2007 make reference to distinct incidents in either opening argu-ments or analysis,with six of the40working with data from a past incident.Logically,the papers fall almost exclusively in the Disaster Services or Hazard Specific groups within the convenience sample,such as the modelling of quick respon
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35
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Year
N u m b e r o f E O R P u b l i c a t i o n s
berica
19772007好的英语学习网站
19651967196919711973200520032001199919971995199319911989197519791987198519831981Figure 1Emergency respon rearch (EOR)articles in convenience sample,by year of publication.
in the context of disaster relief by Sheu (2007),using data from a major earthquake that struck Taiwan in 1999.
EOR journal outlets
Table 2displays the same t of 361EOR papers,sorted by journal outlet.The convenience sampling process ulti-mately netted 36distinct journal outlets from the broader t tracked by the Web of Science ®databa rvice;however,Table 2shows that two-thirds of the publications were published in ven of tho journals.Interestingly,two of the top three journals in terms of paper count are not main-stream OR journals,but engineering-oriented journals with a
沪江网校如何multidisciplinary approach to the issues of safety and relia-bility of systems.This dominance is even more compelling when considering the fact that,unlike most of the top main-stream OR journals,neither of the journals published under tho titles throughout the entire 1965–2007period.
In the context of Figure 1,top-ranking Reliability Engineering &System Safety does not begin contributing to published EOR until 1982and Safety Science does not emerge until 1991.Of mainstream OR journals,the Journal of the Opera-tional Rearch Society (JORS ),combined with the activity under its earlier title of OR Quarterly ,claims the highest proportion of articles within the convenience sample.As Table 2illustrates,this is followed by the substantial published
NC Simpson and PG Hancock—Fifty years of operational rearch S129
Table2Emergency respon rearch articles in convenience sample,by journal outlet
Urban Services Disaster Services Hazard Specific General Emergency Total Reliability Engineering&System Safety113131946 Safety Science81491344 Jrnl of the Operational Rearchmene
Society(OR Quarterly)
18651544
2012江苏高考历史European Jrnl of Operational Rearch13114937 Management Science2022832 Interfaces834419 Operations Rearch913619 Computers Environment&Urban Systems1012215 Computers&Operations Rearch311813 Expert Systems with Applications232512 INFOR405312 In
ternational Jrnl of Systems Science019111 All other journals in sample1418131257
EOR contributions of the European Journal of Operational Rearch(EJOR),Management Science,Interfaces and Oper-ations Rearch,this approximate mix being consistent with the disaster-orientedfindings of Altay and Green(2006). Not apparent in the summary of Table2,however,is the overall pattern of journal outlet involvement between1965 and2007.As noted earlier,the majority of EOR publications appearing in Management Science appear before1990,while over half of the convenience sample contribution of Opera-tions Rearch had appeared by1978.In contrast,the balance of the mainstream OR journals mentioned contributed arti-cles in a chronological pattern similar to that of the overall aggregate volume within the sample.
EOR methodology
Table3breaks the convenience sample down by OR method-ology,again yielding results nearly identical to the earlier survey of Altay and Green(2006).Mathematical program-ming is the most common OR approach to the difficulties of emergency respon,followed by probability and statistics and then by simulation.Table3shows this general ranking is likewi fairly consistent across the component EOR focus categories,with a few interesting exceptions.Math program-ming,for example,
is the most common methodology within each of the focus categories with the exception of Hazard Specific,where statistical analysis dominates.Probability and statistics otherwi ranks cond,unless the focus is Disaster Services,where the problems inherent in analysing historical data of infrequent and exceptional events are likely influ-encing its relegation to fourth.Half of all articles applying decision theory or multi-attribute utility theory(MAUT) appear in the Urban Services category,as well as two-thirds of all instances of soft OR.
While Figure1strongly suggests that emergency rvices and emergency respon compri a current growth ctor for OR rearch,obrvations of downward trends such as offered by Green and Kolesar(2004)are consistent if one examines the Urban Services focus category in particular—this is the only sub-ctor that does not follow the overall pattern. The application-oriented investigations into the operation of police,fire and ambulance rvices are the genesis of the general body of published EOR knowledge,as the early works of Valinsky(1955),Hogg(1968)and Savas(1969)all fall solidly into the category of Urban Services.If the public ctor is the‘cradle’of OR,then urban emergency respon rvice is the‘cradle’of EOR,as discusd in detail in the next ction.
Convenience sample,part I:the early era of urban rvices
Figure1illustrates how rearch articles appearing before 1978belong almost exclusively to the Urban Services focus category,which likewi dominates the overall rearch accomplished during its peak era of1981–1984.Many of the works embedded in the early years address what could be argued as the original EOR problems:fire station location planning and its companion issue offire company assign-ment.Following the thread of Valinsky(1955)and Hogg (1968),such papers contributing to Urban Services EOR before1984include Walker(1974),Rider(1976),Plane and Hendrick(1977),Schilling et al(1980)and Schreuder(1981). Indeed,examining the few non-Urban Services EOR publi-cations from the1970s reveals that the majority of the are nonetheless focud specifically on the issue of location plan-ning,such as the influential articles of Toregas et al(1971) and Aly and White(1978).It is also interesting to note that locatingfire stations not only compris the original EOR problem,this rearch activity likewi continues through to prent day,such as the harnessing of the earlier analytical approaches in conjunction with‘soft constraints’reprenting the realities of stakeholder perceptions(Hewitt,2002),or the application of genetic algorithms to this enduring problem (Yang et al,2007).
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Table3Emergency respon rearch articles in convenience sample,by methodology上半年英文
Number of Percent of conveni-Ranking within focus category
articles ence sample
Urban Disaster Hazard General
Services Services Specific Emergency Math programming,including
stochastic and constraint
programming
13136.31121
Probability and statistics7520.82413 simulation4512.53252 Decision theory&MAUT359.77335 Systems dynamics277.54764 Fuzzy ts and expert systems24 6.68646 Queuing theory14 3.96578 Soft OR10 2.85887
While EOR work began in earnest in thefire rvice, the subquent peak in the Urban Services category during 1978–1984was due mostly to the emergence of a large body of work focud on poli
ce rvices:over38%of all police-specific rearch investigations gathered into the convenience sample were published during this time period.Much of this work was an outgrowth of a highly productive partnership between the City of New York and the RAND Corporation during that era,recounted recently in Larson(2002)and Green and Kolesar(2004),and likewi responsible for many of the earlierfire rvice-related publications discusd.Like many other papers motivated by the efforts of the New York City RAND Institute(NYCRI),police-oriented EOR work such as the patrol car allocation modelling of Chaiken and Dormont (1978a,b)often appeared in Management Science.Many of thefindings of NYCRI were then accumulated into two influential books reprenting NYCRI’sfire versus police OR activities:Walker et al(1979)Fire Department Deployment Analysis:A Public Sector Ca Study,and Larson’s(1972) Urban Police Patrol Analysis.
Later in the1980s EOR work devoted to ambulances then reaches its peak,with nearly half of all the convenience sample papers with‘ambulance’in the title being published in this interval between1984and1990.Interestingly,placement of ambulances was the subject of some of the earliest EOR work(Savas,1969;Fitzsimmons,1973),reprenting land-mark introductions of simulation as a tool to motivate policy. It is likely that the growth in ambulance-oriented EOR studies more than a decade later reflected OR support during the expansion of that particular emergency discipline.While
the esntial process and infrastructure of cityfirefighting and law enforcement were long established at the outt of OR’s involvement in tho activities,the nature of the ambulance rvice was evolving dramatically during that same period. In the United States,the early1970s witnesd the introduc-tion of the concepts of‘pre-hospital care’and the launch of the civilian paramedic as a profession,propelled by a ries of government initiatives to foster local adoption(Grant et al,1994).In contrast to the body of NYCRI-related work,the majority of the subquent ambulance-oriented cohort of investigations appeared in JORS and EJOR,often ca-oriented and featuring locations ranging from Bangkok (Fujiwara et al,1987)to the Dominican Republic(Eaton et al,1986).
Nonetheless,NYCRI is recognized as the source of much of the early work in emergency rvices(Green and Kolesar, 2004;Wright et al,2006).Not only did this partnership produce a substantial body of published EOR employing tools such as linear and integer programming,queuing theory and simulation against the urban landscape of New York City (NYC),the inter-relationships between the projects created a foundation of work framing much of what has been accom-plished since.One early and influential member of the NYCRI publication cohort is Kolesar and Blum(1973),who derived general principles of the relationships of distance,respon time and the number offire stations assigned to a respon area.During the balance of the convenience sample in
terval, 1973–2007,this‘square root law’offire respon has been cited by31other OR papers as tracked by Web of Science®, and the papers have in turn been cited by178additional OR investigations.Of this combined cohort of210journal arti-cles,68of tho publications concern emergency respon, who identities and citation relationships are illustrated in Figure2.
Publications associated with the NYCRI,reprenting either direct products,direct NYC-bad extensions or exten-sive discussions of same,are indicated with darker nodes in Figure2,and the‘ed’reference of Kolesar and Blum(1973) that defines the network,or‘citation map’,can be located at its centre.Any node within the illustration heavily ringed with arrowheads indicates a highly influential article in terms of subquent citations;nodes with an unusual number of arcs radiating away to connect elwhere are typically liter-ature surveys.While a single arc does not communicate the degree of influence one rearch study had upon another—the arcs in Figure2reprents instances ranging from cursory
