REAL-TIME DISPATCHING AND REDEPLOYMENT OF HETEROGENEOUS EMERGENCY VEHICLES FLEET WITH A BALANCED WORKLOAD

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2023

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Abstract

The emergency management service (EMS) system is a complicated system that tries to coordinate each system component to provide a quick response to emergencies. Different types of vehicles cooperate to finish the tasks under unified command. The EMS system tries to respond quickly to emergency calls and communicate with each department to balance the resources and provide maximal coverage for the whole system. This work aims to develop a highly efficient model for the EMS system to assist the coordinator in making the dispatching and relocation decisions simultaneously. Meanwhile, the model will make a route decision to provide the vehicle drivers with route guidance. In the model, heterogenous emergency vehicle fleets consisting of police vehicles, Basic Life Support (BLS) vehicles, Advanced Life Support (ALS) vehicles, Fire Engines, Fire Trucks, and Fire Quants are considered. Moreover, a coverage strategy is proposed, and different coverage types are considered according to the division of vehicle function. The model tries to provide maximal coverage by advanced vehicles under the premise of ensuring full coverage by basic vehicles. The workload balance of the vehicle crews is considered in the model to ensure fairness. A mathematical model is proposed, then a numerical study is conducted to test the model's performance. The results show that the proposed model can perform well in large-scale problems with significant demands. A comprehensive analysis is conducted on the real-case historical medical data. Then a discrete event simulation system is built. The framework of a discrete event simulation model can mimic the evolution of the entire operation of an emergency response system over time. Finally, the proposed model and discrete event simulation system are applied to the real-case historical medical data. Three different categories of performance measurements are collected, analyzed, and compared with the real-case data. A comprehensive sensitivity analysis is conducted to test the ability of the model to handle different situations. The final results illustrate that the proposed model can improve overall performance in various evaluation metrics.

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