Abstract
This paper addresses the problem of scheduling ambulance crews in order to maximize the coverage throughout a planning horizon. The problem includes the subproblem of locating ambulances to maximize expected coverage with probabilistic response times, for which a tabu search algorithm is developed. The proposed tabu search algorithm is empirically shown to outperform previous approaches for this subproblem. Two integer programming models that use the output of the tabu search algorithm are constructed for the main problem. Computational experiments with real data are conducted. A comparison of the results of the models is presented.
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Acknowledgements
This work was partially funded by the Canadian Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council under Grants 39682-05 and 203534-07. This support is gratefully acknowledged. We thank the Edmonton and Calgary EMS departments for providing access to data, and Dan Haight and Matt Stanton of the Centre for Excellence in Operations at the University of Alberta School of Business for their assistance with data preparation. Finally, thanks are due to two referees for their valuable comments.
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Erdoğan, G., Erkut, E., Ingolfsson, A. et al. Scheduling ambulance crews for maximum coverage. J Oper Res Soc 61, 543–550 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1057/jors.2008.163
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/jors.2008.163