1. ¹Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain
2. ² Universidade dos Açores, Ponta Delgada, Portugal

Correspondence: F Silva, CEEAplA, Universidade dos Açores-DEG, Rua da Mae de Deus, Ponta Delgada 9502, Portugal. E-mail: fsilva@notes.uac.pt, francisco.silva@upf.edu

Received December 2005; Accepted June 2007; Published online 25 July 2007.

Abstract

Previous covering models for emergency service consider all the calls to be of the same importance and impose the same waiting time constraints independently of the service's priority. This type of constraint is clearly inappropriate in many contexts. For example, in urban medical emergency services, calls that involve danger to human life deserve higher priority over calls for more routine incidents. A realistic model in such a context should allow prioritizing the calls for service. In this paper, a covering model which considers different priority levels is formulated and solved. The model heritages its formulation from previous research on Maximum Coverage Models and incorporates results from Queuing Theory, in particular Priority Queuing. The additional complexity incorporated in the model justifies the use of a heuristic procedure.