Air MEDEVAC Asset Dispatching and Prioritized Casualty Transporting Model for Military Medical Evacuation Systems with Distinguishable Medical Treatment Facilities and Errors in Triage.

摘要

Decision making in military medical evacuation (MEDEVAC) of casualties consists of identifying which MEDEVAC asset to dispatch in response to a casualty and which medical treatment facility to transport the casualty, both of which contribute to the likelihood of casualty survival. These decisions become complicated when MEDEVAC assets and medical treatment facilities are distinguishable and casualties are prioritized as life-threatening and non life-threatening. In this paper, an undiscounted, infinite horizon Markov decision process model is developed that examines the interrelated decisions of how to optimally dispatch MEDEVAC assets to calls for service and transport casualties to medical treatment facilities. The model accounts for errors made during triage of casualties to investigate the revelation of information over time and allows for batch arrival of casualties to the system. The MDP is solved with a value iteration algorithm. The optimal policy is compared to three heuristic casualty transport policies.