Strategic ambulance location for heterogeneous regions

Abstract

Providing Emergency Medical Services (EMS) is a key function of society. To achieve high quality EMS, planning is of vital importance. An important strategic and tactical problem is the location of ambulance stations and the allocation of ambulances to these stations. This paper presents a new mixed integer model for this problem especially suitable for regions with heterogeneous demand and multiple performance measures. The model decides on the location/allocation of stations/ambulances, calculates the service and arrival rates for each station and the probabilities that a call is served by a particular station. The model is tested on a combined urban and rural area in Norway with multiple performance measures. Compared with the current solution for the area, the best solution from the model has a higher expected performance on each of the performance measures used.