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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Repasky, Matthew, Wang, He, Xie, Yao
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.02246
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author Repasky, Matthew
Wang, He
Xie, Yao
author_facet Repasky, Matthew
Wang, He
Xie, Yao
contents Police patrol units need to split their time between performing preventive patrol and being dispatched to serve emergency incidents. In the existing literature, patrol and dispatch decisions are often studied separately. We consider joint optimization of these two decisions to improve police operations efficiency and reduce response time to emergency calls. Methodology/results: We propose a novel method for jointly optimizing multi-agent patrol and dispatch to learn policies yielding rapid response times. Our method treats each patroller as an independent Q-learner (agent) with a shared deep Q-network that represents the state-action values. The dispatching decisions are chosen using mixed-integer programming and value function approximation from combinatorial action spaces. We demonstrate that this heterogeneous multi-agent reinforcement learning approach is capable of learning joint policies that outperform those optimized for patrol or dispatch alone. Managerial Implications: Policies jointly optimized for patrol and dispatch can lead to more effective service while targeting demonstrably flexible objectives, such as those encouraging efficiency and equity in response.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_02246
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Joint Police Patrol and Dispatch
Repasky, Matthew
Wang, He
Xie, Yao
Machine Learning
Optimization and Control
Police patrol units need to split their time between performing preventive patrol and being dispatched to serve emergency incidents. In the existing literature, patrol and dispatch decisions are often studied separately. We consider joint optimization of these two decisions to improve police operations efficiency and reduce response time to emergency calls. Methodology/results: We propose a novel method for jointly optimizing multi-agent patrol and dispatch to learn policies yielding rapid response times. Our method treats each patroller as an independent Q-learner (agent) with a shared deep Q-network that represents the state-action values. The dispatching decisions are chosen using mixed-integer programming and value function approximation from combinatorial action spaces. We demonstrate that this heterogeneous multi-agent reinforcement learning approach is capable of learning joint policies that outperform those optimized for patrol or dispatch alone. Managerial Implications: Policies jointly optimized for patrol and dispatch can lead to more effective service while targeting demonstrably flexible objectives, such as those encouraging efficiency and equity in response.
title Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Joint Police Patrol and Dispatch
topic Machine Learning
Optimization and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.02246