Runaway and homeless youth (RHY) are a group of youth and young adults who are at high risk of being exploited through human trafficking. Although access to housing and support services is an effective way to decrease their vulnerability to being exploited, research reveals that coordination of these services provided to RHY by non-profit and government organizations is neither standardized, nor efficient. This situation often causes decreased, delayed, and inequitable access to these scarce housing resources. In this study, we aim to increase the housing system efficiency and reduce the barriers that are contributing to inequitable access to housing through simulation modeling and analyses. Specifically, we simulate a set of crisis and emergency shelters in New York City, funded by a single governmental organization, considering a queuing network with pools of multiple parallel servers, servers with demographic eligibility criteria, stochastic RHY arrival, impatient youth behaviour (possibility of abandonment), and a decision-maker (coordinator) that determines which server pool RHY is routed to. This simulation allows us to evaluate the impact of different queue routing strategies. Our simulation results show that by changing the way RHY is routed to shelters, we can reduce the average wait time by approximately a day and decrease the proportion of RHY abandoning the shelters by 13%.

翻译：离家出走和无家可归的青少年（RHY）是一群极易遭受人口贩卖剥削的高风险青少年和青年。尽管获得住房和支持服务是降低其遭受剥削风险的有效途径，但研究表明，非营利组织和政府机构为RHY提供的这些服务协调既未标准化也不高效。这种情况常导致这些稀缺住房资源获取的减少、延迟和不公平。本研究旨在通过仿真建模与分析，提高住房系统的效率，并减少导致住房获取不公平的障碍。具体而言，我们模拟了纽约市由单一政府机构资助的一系列危机和紧急避难所，考虑了一个具有多并行服务器池、服务器设有入群人口统计资格标准、RHY随机到达、青少年不耐烦行为（放弃可能性）以及决策者（协调员）决定RHY路由至哪个服务器池的排队网络。该仿真使我们能够评估不同排队路由策略的影响。仿真结果表明，通过改变RHY路由至避难所的方式，我们可将平均等待时间缩短约一天，并将RHY放弃避难所的比例降低13%。