  Runaway and homeless youth (RHY) are a group of youth and young adults who
are at high risk of being exploited through human trafficking. Although access
to housing and support services is an effective way to decrease their
vulnerability to being exploited, research reveals that coordination of these
services provided to RHY by non-profit and government organizations is neither
standardized, nor efficient. This situation often causes decreased, delayed,
and inequitable access to these scarce housing resources. In this study, we aim
to increase the housing system efficiency and reduce the barriers that are
contributing to inequitable access to housing through simulation modeling and
analyses. Specifically, we simulate a set of crisis and emergency shelters in
New York City, funded by a single governmental organization, considering a
queuing network with pools of multiple parallel servers, servers with
demographic eligibility criteria, stochastic RHY arrival, impatient youth
behaviour (possibility of abandonment), and a decision-maker (coordinator) that
determines which server pool RHY is routed to. This simulation allows us to
evaluate the impact of different queue routing strategies. Our simulation
results show that by changing the way RHY is routed to shelters, we can reduce
the average wait time by approximately a day and decrease the proportion of RHY
abandoning the shelters by 13%.
