Ambulance dispatching during a pandemic: Tradeoffs of categorizing patients and allocating ambulances.

ABSTRACT: Amidst a pandemic, operators of emergency medical service (EMS) systems aim at upholding service at sufficiently low response times while reducing the infection probability of their personnel. Designating ambulances to serve only infected patients and suspected cases may reduce the outage probabilities of ambulances and consequently the response times of the EMS. We investigate the benefits that EMS personnel and patients can gain from such a split. As a solution method to quantify these benefits, we apply a two-stage approach. First, we run a first-stage optimization model to pre-select ambulance splits with the highest emergency call coverage. Second, we solve the approximate Hypercube Queuing Model (AHQM) to evaluate the performance of the pre-selected ambulance splits at the second sta

SUBMITTER: Rautenstrauss M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8638217 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature