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.
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Acknowledgements
This research has been possible thanks to the grant SFRH/BD/2916/2000 from the Ministério da Ciência e da Tecnologia, Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia of the Portuguese government, and grant BEC2000-1027 from the Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnologia, of the Spanish government.
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Silva, F., Serra, D. Locating emergency services with different priorities: the priority queuing covering location problem. J Oper Res Soc 59, 1229–1238 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.jors.2602473
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.jors.2602473