Dynamic Ambulance Redeployment by Optimizing Coverage

The task of emergency medical services (EMS) is to timely provide service to those in urgent need of medical attention. In order to achieve this, ambulances must arrive at the emergency location within a time threshold imposed by the government. To facilitate this, sufficient base locations containing ambulances are spread across regions. An important concept is the notion of 'coverage'. Because each region must be sufficiently covered at any time, ambulances are constantly redeployed to different base locations. To solve the relocation problem of ambulances, a model called the MEXCLP is implemented that optimizes the total coverage. Two policies are to be distinguished: applying the static policy necessitates that idle ambulances always return to a predefined base location after finishing service and the dynamic policy works in conjunction with the dynamic MEXCLP to determine the location that optimizes the total coverage. By simulation, the performances of the EMS policies are measured. From the results, the dynamic policy always outperforms the static policy under any circumstance. Nevertheless, the static policy is useful as a benchmark. This thesis provides a solution to the dynamic ambulance redeployment problem using methods from a related research. Furthermore, it provides analysis on performance levels for various research questions. The key performance indicator (KPI) is the expected fraction of late arrivals, which is to be minimized. Another relevant number is the expected average response time, which correlates with the expected fraction of late arrivals. This research shows that the fraction of late arrivals can be as low as four percent.