Emergency Vehicle Dispatchers’ use of an Automatic Assignment System

Amit Moshe is a M.Sc. student in the department of Industrial Engineering

​Tel Aviv University​, 22 March 2022, 14:00 PM, Room 206& via zoom

Abstract:
The study concerns emergency vehicle dispatchers in the call center at “Magen David Adom” (MDA), which is Israel’s national emergency medical services. Specifically, we focus on the operator’s interaction with an automatic system in a high-stakes context. In 2018, an automatic aid system was introduced in the call center, with the aim of automating the ambulance assignment task. In this study, we analyze the use of the system to understand the use of the system by the dispatchers. In the seminar, we will present the dataset of real-life ambulance assignment events that was at our disposal. We will then show the preprocessing steps we took to fit the dataset to our study’s requirements, the different methods we used to analyze the data, and our findings regarding the characteristics that affect the dispatchers’ behavior when making dispatch decisions with the help of the automatic system. Our results revealed which features of events influenced dispatchers’ tendency to rely on the automatic assignment system. Moreover, we connect these characteristics to a major factor in the dispatchers’ decision making process – the complexity of the event. This allows us to explain the dispatchers’ behavior in this specific interaction, applying concepts from Human-Automation Interaction and related fields.

Bio:
Amit Moshe is a M.Sc. student in the department of Industrial Engineering. He has a B.Sc. in Industrial Engineering and Management from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. In the past few years, Amit has been working as a Data Scientist in the Ad-Tech and Fraud industries in global companies. The research was conducted under the supervision of Prof. Joachim Meyer and Dr. Yuval Bitan, from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in collaboration with Magen David Adom.