Resource planning conditions the daily operation of any organization providing an essential service. It ensures that the right people are in the right place, with the necessary means, and at the right time to respond to citizens’ needs while making the best possible use of public resources.

Although the most immediate thought is the creation of shifts or schedules, its scope is much broader. Planning involves coordinating people, vehicles, facilities, and other assets while considering operational, regulatory, and budgetary constraints that change continuously. Every decision influences the ability to maintain service levels, efficiently utilize public resources, and respond quickly when circumstances change.

This reality affects a large part of Public Administration. Emergency services, hospitals, maintenance crews, public transit, and citizen service teams share the same challenge: organizing limited resources to provide continuous service in increasingly complex environments.

Planning involves more variables than it seems

Every planning effort pursues a simple goal on paper: to allocate available resources in the most appropriate way. In practice, achieving that balance requires simultaneously considering a large number of constraints.

Staff availability, rest periods, minimum service coverage, specialization of certain profiles, territorial assignment, vehicle or facility availability, and predicted demand evolution are just some of the variables involved in daily planning.

Furthermore, these variables maintain a constant relationship with each other. A change in any one of them can alter the rest of the plan. The absence of a professional, an incident with an asset, or a new operational priority forces a review of resource distribution to maintain service without breaching other constraints.

For this reason, planning ceases to be an administrative exercise and becomes a complex decision-making problem. The larger the organization, the greater the number of possible alternatives that must be evaluated before deciding which one is most appropriate.

Experience remains one of the main assets

Planning has always depended on the knowledge of the people responsible for coordinating operations. Their experience allows them to understand how the service works, anticipate incidents, and evaluate aspects that can hardly be captured in a procedure.

However, in recent years, the complexity of these decisions has increased significantly. Organizations manage more information, work with a larger number of resources, and must respond to rapidly evolving situations—without forgetting that we are talking about public resources that must be handled responsibly.

In this context, manually analyzing all available alternatives is becoming increasingly difficult. Not because those in charge know the operations any less, but because the number of possible combinations grows much faster than human capacity to evaluate them within the available time.

The role of artificial intelligence in resource planning

Artificial intelligence is beginning to be used as a support tool precisely in these types of decisions. Combined with mathematical optimization techniques, it allows for the analysis of a large number of scenarios and the generation of proposals that respect the constraints defined by the organization itself.

To do this, it integrates information from different systems, incorporates existing operational rules, and simultaneously evaluates thousands of possible combinations before proposing a plan.

Operations managers maintain control of the process at all times. They are the ones who validate proposals, make adjustments when necessary, and make the final decision. Technology provides analytical capacity and computing speed, while operational knowledge remains essential for interpreting each situation.

This approach allows less time to be spent building the plan and more time evaluating different alternatives when unexpected changes occur in operations.

Emergency services represent one of the most demanding scenarios

Emergency services constitute one of the most complex examples of resource planning within Public Administration.

Every day, they must coordinate professionals with different specialties, guarantee the proper composition of care units, distribute vehicles across different operational bases, and maintain response capacity 24 hours a day.

Added to this complexity are incidents that can arise at any moment: changes in staff availability, new care needs, or extraordinary situations that require rapid reorganization of available resources without compromising service continuity.

Precisely because they gather a high number of operational constraints, these types of organizations represent an especially interesting environment for developing new planning support tools.

This is the context for DesafIA Madrid, the open innovation program promoted by the Madrid City Council to explore artificial intelligence-based solutions applied to real Public Administration challenges.

One of the selected projects corresponds to the challenge posed by the Directorate General of SAMUR-Civil Protection, aimed at improving the daily organization of its resources through a system capable of generating planning proposals that consider working hours, rest periods, professional profiles, care unit composition, and assignment to operational bases.

To address this challenge, at Baobab we are developing a Decision AI solution that combines artificial intelligence and mathematical optimization to facilitate the preparation and updating of plans when service conditions change. The solution generates proposals taking into account the operational constraints defined by the organization and provides an objective basis for evaluating alternatives and reorganizing resources more quickly, always keeping the judgment of operations managers at the center of the decision.

A challenge shared by many public organizations

Although the project presented is being developed within an emergency service like SAMUR-Civil Protection, the nature of the problem transcends this specific case. Efficient resource planning and allocation is a common challenge across many areas of public administration.

Water and sanitation services, waste management and urban cleaning, transportation and mobility, infrastructure and assets, citizen services, as well as healthcare and emergencies, must coordinate people, vehicles, equipment, and infrastructure daily to provide the best possible service. All of this while respecting multiple operational, regulatory, and budgetary constraints, as well as responding to changing demand and incidents that force a continuous rethinking of planning.

Although resources, priorities, and performance indicators vary depending on the area of activity, the underlying decision is essentially the same: how to use available resources to maximize the quality of service provided to citizens.

In this context, mathematical optimization techniques and artificial intelligence have become high-value tools to support decision-making. Their ability to evaluate multiple scenarios, incorporate complex constraints, and recalculate plans when conditions change makes it possible to improve resource allocation, increase operational efficiency, and respond with greater agility to the needs of each public service.