Ambulance location under temporal variation in demand using a mixed coded memetic algorithm

¹ Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur 721302, West Bengal, India
² National Rail and Transportation Institute, Vadodara 390004, Gujarat, India

^* Corresponding author: ravi1989.06@gmail.com

Received: 13 January 2022
Accepted: 4 August 2022

Abstract

Emergency medical services (EMS) are among the most important services in any society due to their role in saving people’s lives and reducing morbidities. The location of ambulance stations and the allocation of ambulances to the stations is an important planning problem for any EMS system to ensure adequate coverage while minimising the response time. This study considers a mixed-integer programming model that determines the ambulance locations by considering the time of day variations in demand. The presented model also considers heterogeneous performance measures based on survival function and coverage for different patient types with varying levels of urgency. A memetic algorithm based-approach that applies a mixed chromosome representation for solutions is proposed to solve the problem. Our computational results indicate that neglecting time-dependent variation of demand can underestimate the number of ambulances required by up to 15% during peak demand. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution approach in providing good quality solutions within a reasonable time.