A stochastic approach for designing two-tiered emergency medical service systems

Rania Boujemaa, Aida Jebali (), Sondes Hammami, Angel Ruiz and Hanen Bouchriha
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Rania Boujemaa: Université de Tunis El Manar
Aida Jebali: University of Sharjah
Sondes Hammami: Université de Tunis El Manar
Angel Ruiz: Université Laval
Hanen Bouchriha: Université de Tunis El Manar

Flexible Services and Manufacturing Journal, 2018, vol. 30, issue 1, No 7, 123-152

Abstract: Abstract Emergency medical services (EMS) systems provide out-of-hospital acute medical care and transportation to the appropriate health care provider to patients with illnesses and injuries. The objective of EMS systems is to satisfy demand requests by providing timely first care medical assistance to patients at the incident scene. This paper aims at designing a robust two-tiered EMS system while accounting for the inherent uncertainty of the demand. A two-stage stochastic programming location-allocation model is proposed to simultaneously determine the location of ambulance stations, the number and the type of ambulances to be deployed, and the demand areas served by each station. This problem is then solved efficiently using the sampling average approximation algorithm. Computational experiments highlight the performance of the proposed solution approach and its practical applicability.

Keywords: Stochastic programming; Emergency medical services (EMS); Location-allocation model; Sample average approximation (SAA) (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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DOI: 10.1007/s10696-017-9286-6

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