Location Privacy Protection and 911 Task Allocation in Vehicle-Based via Differential Privacy

The allocation of tasks in emergency response services, particularly within the framework of 911 operations, presents a critical challenge especially when ensuring the confidentiality of workers’ whereabouts. This issue arises from the necessity for responders to disclose their whereabouts to a central server for efficient task assignment, raising concerns regarding privacy breaches and potential risks to responders’ safety. In this paper, we address this issue by introducing a novel framework capable of assigning two 911 workers to respond to a patient’s request for help, while effectively safeguarding the workers’ location privacy through a devised location obfuscation strategy. Based on the constrained optimization of the location privacy protection model and task allocation model, we find that it can be approximated as two linear programming problems that can be solved by mature methods. Finally, we conduct a simulation experiments, the results of which illustrate the effectiveness of our approach in task allocation while preserving location privacy.