TITLE:
Ambulance Deployment and Shift Scheduling: An Integrated Approach
AUTHORS:
Hari K. Rajagopalan, Cem Saydam, Hubert Setzler, Elizabeth Sharer
KEYWORDS:
Ambulance Location, Dynamic Relocation, Shift Scheduling, Hypercube
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Service Science and Management,
Vol.4 No.1,
March
8,
2011
ABSTRACT: Emergency medical response providers’ primary responsibility is to deploy an adequate number of ambulances in a manner that will yield the best service to a constituent population. In this paper we develop a two-stage integrated solution for complex ambulance deployment and crew shift scheduling. In the first stage we develop a dynamic expected coverage model to determine the minimum number of ambulances and their locations for each time interval and solve via a tabu search. For the second stage, we develop an integer programming model which uses the solution obtained from the first stage to determine optimal crew schedules. We present computational statistics and demonstrate the efficacy of our two-stage solution approach using a case study.