A simulation of a police patrol service system with multi-grade time-varying incident arrivals

Due to the squeeze on public expenditure, the funding cuts imposed on the police provide a great impetus to find an efficient incident response sequence with limited resources. This is especially the case for police response systems which exhibit the characteristics of time-varying volume of demand. In this paper, we investigate two types of priority queues in the patrol service system. Both the incident arrival rate and the scheduled staff level change with time. For such a system, there is no analytical model available to give close-form performance, so simulation is used for the study. Although dynamic priority queues which enable more flexibility in setting the sequence of service requests are widely applied in many service systems, such as the NHS service system, the simulation model results show that in police patrol service systems static priority queue performs better.