A simulation and optimisation package for emergency medical services

Abstract

Emergency Medical Service (EMS) providers make decisions such as selecting ambulance station locations and ambulance dispatch policies; these decisions can be made effectively with the aid of optimisation and simulation models. We have developed JEMSS – a Julia (programming language) package for Emergency Medical Services Simulation – to allow for performance evaluation and optimisation of decisions or policies for problems arising in EMS operations and strategic planning. To the best of our knowledge this is the first free and open-source EMS simulation and optimisation package, which incorporates integer programming optimisation, heuristic local search, and simulation capabilities. The decision protocols used for ambulance dispatch and dynamic redeployment during a simulation run are flexible and easy to customize. Analytical optimisation models relevant to EMS decision-making are included, such as for station location and ambulance deployment problems. The simulations run quickly, requiring less than a second to simulate 100 days for a realistic city model. Data to simulate Auckland, New Zealand is included in the package and other cities will be added to enable researchers to conduct a more varied and fair comparison of newly developed EMS strategies. The JEMSS package includes a visualisation tool to view the simulation as it is running. The simulation model has been validated by comparing the simulation trace and output of existing EMS simulation and analysis software BartSim. This paper details the JEMSS design and presents a case study showing how to apply integer programming, local search, and simulation optimisation using JEMSS.