Optimal Emergency Vehicles Location: an approach considering the hierarchy and substitutability of resources

Abstract

Decisions on where to locate emergency vehicles have a crucial impact on the quality of the emergency service that is provided to populations, with consequences in terms of mortality and quality of life. It is important to guarantee the access of the population to emergency care, not forgetting the need to guarantee the best possible use of all available resources. In this work a new integer linear programming model is presented that aims at optimizing the location of emergency vehicles, considering in an explicit way the substitutability possibilities among vehicles of different types, taken into account the type of care they can provide. Moreover, the assignment of variables to emergency episodes is also explicitly considered which allows the model to be more accurate when calculating the expected coverage obtained. Both deterministic and stochastic models are presented. In the stochastic model, uncertainty regarding emergency episodes is represented by using scenarios. The model is applied to a dataset built considering all the features which are present in real data.