Directed Search for Non-Dominated Emergency Medical System Designs

Abstract

This research paper is aimed at a specific group of emergency medical service location problems, which are solved to save people’s lives and reduce the rate of mortality and morbidity. Since searching for the optimal service center deployment is a big challenge, many operations researchers, programmers, and healthcare practitioners have been making a great effort to find effective solutions since the 1960s. Within this paper, we study such a system design problem in which two contradictory objectives are taken into account. Since the optimization of one criterion causes deterioration in the value of the other, a specific small finite set of solutions seems to be a sufficient output of the associated solving process for further decision-making. Therefore, we study here several heuristic approaches that enable us to approximate the original Pareto fronts of non-dominated system designs. In addition to the theoretical explanation, we provide the readers with the results of numerical experiments in order to evaluate the quality of the proposed algorithms. Based on the presented results, it can be stated that the suggested approach is able to produce a good approximation of the Pareto front of emergency medical service system designs in acceptable computational time, which is in orders shorter than the one required by the former exact method.