Advances in Tiered Emergency Services

Emergency medical services aim to protect the welfare of the public from health emergencies. Researchers have been developing optimization models and methods to locate ambulances for more than 50 years. Although researchers have created a body of knowledge for locating and dispatching ambulances, public safety leaders must continually adapt to address new risks in budget-constrained environments. As a result, many research challenges remain.

To manage costs while serving patients with different health needs, many emergency medical service systems employ a tiered system that uses multiple types of emergency vehicles and service providers with different service capabilities for responding to patients. Accounting for multiple types of vehicles, including non-transport vehicles, and prioritized calls for service introduces complexity to existing models and allows for new response protocols. 

In this talk, Dr. Laura Albert will discuss her research in tiered emergency medical service systems that has advanced our knowledge of how to locate and dispatch vehicles. She will propose a two-stage stochastic-programming model that informs how to locate two types of ambulances, and she will introduce a Markov decision process model for dispatching vehicles to prioritized calls for service. She will demonstrate how the models can be adapted to include non-transport vehicles. The results inform fleet mix decisions and inform when sending multiple vehicles to a call is warranted. She will also discuss emergency medical service performance measures and insights obtained from putting the results into practice in a real world setting.

Zoom link: https://eur-nl.zoom.us/j/98845156215?from=addon

Meeting ID: 988 4515 6215