Data-driven systems design for last-mile emergency logistics: Drone-based AED delivery under uncertainty

Abstract:

Timely intervention is the critical determinant of survival for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, yet many emergency medical service (EMS) systems fail to meet life-saving response-time thresholds under limited budgets and uncertain demand. Enabled by Internet-plus technologies, new emergency logistics paradigms are emerging, but their effective design remains an open challenge. This talk presents an Internet-plus emergency logistics framework for drone-based delivery of disposable automated external defibrillators (AEDs). Shifting away from minimizing average or tail response times, the framework focuses on maximizing the number of patients reached within a critical therapeutic window, where intervention has the greatest impact. We formulate this problem as a modular capacitated maximum covering location model, jointly optimizing drone base locations and AED inventories under severe resource constraints and demand uncertainty. To ensure real-world relevance, the framework integrates distributionally robust optimization, accounts for capacity congestion, and incorporates fairness considerations to mitigate geographic inequities. A large-scale case study using real OHCA data demonstrates substantial gains in timely coverage and equity compared with response-time-based benchmarks. Beyond emergency medicine, the keynote highlights broader lessons for Internet-plus logistics, manufacturing, and service operations, emphasizing threshold-based performance, robust capacity design, and socially responsible resource allocation in digitally enabled service networks.

Biography: 

Professor Bo Chen is a Full Professor at Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (UK), the Operational Research Society (UK), and the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (UK). He holds a BSc in Mathematics from Zhejiang University (1982), an MSc from the Institute of Applied Mathematics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (1987), and a PhD from Erasmus University Rotterdam (1994). Professor Chen has held visiting professorships at Stanford University (2003) and the University of Cambridge (2011), and Chair Professorships at Tsinghua University (2005–2011) and, since 2013, at Fudan University. In 2012, he was awarded a Higher Doctorate by the University of Warwick, recognising a lifetime of distinguished contribution to his field.