A bi-objective location-allocation problem of temporary emergency stations and ambulance routing in a disaster situation

Abstract

The aim of this study is to introduce a new temporary emergency stations distribution for emergency medical services (EMSs) simultaneously in order to find the optimal ambulance routing in a disaster response. Planning and preparedness are a set of activities in pre-disaster situations. When a disaster may not occur for a long time in a specific city, we cannot predict the time of its occurrence. However, in disaster situations, an EMS is faced with a large number of injured people, most of them with critical injuries, in which normal facilities and planning cannot respond. Last disasters teach us that we should be ready to respond correctly to decrease morbidity and mortality. This study seeks a better plan for patients in a post-disaster by categorizing them into very high emergency and normal patients. The main aim of the presented model is to find the best ambulance routing by minimizing the total response time, meanwhile finding the optimal number of a temporary emergency station and the best location setup by taking costs into consideration. The model is exactly solved by the e-constraint method. Then, we can propose the optimal planning for the decision makers.