A robust optimization approach to emergency vehicle scheduling

Abstract

The emergency vehicle scheduling problem is studied under the objective function to minimize the total transportation time with uncertain road travel time. Firstly, we build a stochastic programming model considering the constrained chance. Then, we analyze the model based on robust optimization method and get its equivalent set of uncertainty constraint, which has good mathematical properties with consideration of the robustness of solutions. Finally, we implement a numerical example to compare the results of robust optimization method and that of the particle swarm optimization algorithm. The case study shows that the proposed method achieves better performance on computational complexity and stability. © 2013 Xiao-Xia Rong et al.