@inproceedings{iccps2026_respond,
author = {Zulqarnain, Ammar Bin and Talusan, Jose Paolo and Napier, Kelly and Gens, Corey and Higgs, Jennifer and Herndon, Colleen and Mukhopadhyay, Ayan and Dubey, Abhishek},
title = {RESPOND: An Incident-Level Simulation Platform for Fire and EMS Operations},
year = {2026},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the HSCC/ICCPS 2026: 29th ACM International Conference on Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control and 17th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems},
location = {Saint Malo, France},
abstract = {Growing urban populations strain fire/Emergency Medical Services (EMS) systems, creating societal-scale concerns where decisions about station siting (strategy) and dispatch policies (operations) unfold in a tightly coupled cyber-physical loop. The core challenge lies in validating different approaches since direct experimentation on real populations is infeasible. Prior efforts address isolated components, treating strategic siting heatmaps and operational dispatch heuristics as separate problems. They lack a unified, incident-level simulator to expose the critical cross-policy trade-offs between siting and dispatch. We present RESPOND (REsponse Simulation Platform for Operations, Navigation, and Dispatch), a modular, incident-level, Operational Decision Support System. RESPOND holistically integrates these previously siloed functions, including: (i) optimal station placement, (ii) apparatus allocation, (iii) dispatch policies, (iv) travel time and service time models, and (v) survival modeling for incident prediction. The platform's engine replays historical incidents at unit resolution and stress-tests counterfactual futures (e.g., station moves, demand surges). A planner-facing interface surfaces key metrics (SLA compliance, 90th Percentile (P90) response time) for deliberation. Evaluations demonstrate reproduction of observed response patterns and reveal policy trade-offs. The result is a unifying platform that transforms fragmented analysis into an operational decision environment, enabling safe and rigorous evaluation of coupled station placement and dispatch policies through simulation.},
keywords = {emergency response, dispatch optimization, facility location, simulation, policy evaluation, urban computing, resource allocation},
note = {Acceptance rate: 28\%; Short Paper; Track: Systems and Applications},
series = {HSCC/ICCPS '26}
}