Abstract
Emergency medical service (EMS) systems provide medical care to pre-hospital patients who need rapid response and transport. This paper proposes a modeling approach for joint relocation and districting strategies in EMS systems. This combined approach aims to increase the efficiency of EMS systems. We extend the nested-compliance model (which provides a relocation policy) to consider an upper bound on relocation time by partitioning the whole region into smaller sub-areas (districts). We analyze the decision regarding how to partition the service area into smaller sub-areas in which each sub-area operates independently under separate relocation strategies. Once the district solution is determined, a Tabu search is used to allocate stations and zones to districts and the optimal nested-compliance model solution is applied to each sub-area. The objective is to maximize the overall realized expected coverage. The performance of the combined relocation and districting policies are compared to a static policy (non-relocation and non-district) based on the adjusted maximum expected covering location problem (AMEXCLP) in a simulated system using real-world data. The numerical results show the benefits of our model over the AMEXCLP based on average realized coverage and the fraction of covered calls responded to by the first closest ambulance in the dispatching rank list.
Published Version
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