  Designing effective emergency response management (ERM) systems to respond to
incidents such as road accidents is a major problem faced by communities. In
addition to responding to frequent incidents each day (about 240 million
emergency medical services calls and over 5 million road accidents in the US
each year), these systems also support response during natural hazards.
Recently, there has been a consistent interest in building decision support and
optimization tools that can help emergency responders provide more efficient
and effective response. This includes a number of principled subsystems that
implement early incident detection, incident likelihood forecasting and
strategic resource allocation and dispatch policies. In this paper, we
highlight the key challenges and provide an overview of the approach developed
by our team in collaboration with our community partners.
