Ambulance Routing in Disaster Response Phase Considering Different Types of Ambulances

This paper studies the ambulance routing problem in disaster situations when a large number of injured people from various locations require to receive treatment and medical aid. In such circumstances, many people summoning the ambulance at the same time but the capacity and number of emergency vehicles are not sufficient enough to visit all the patients immediately. Therefore, a crucial part is to management the fleet of ambulances so as to mitigate human suffering. For this reason, we considered three different categories of patients with various requirements. Also the support ambulances are segmented to various classes based on their capabilities. A mathematical formulations is presented to obtain route plans with the aim of minimizing the latest service completion time among the patients. Since, disasters cause major damages to lifeline infrastructures such as refueling-stations, so provided model designs the ambulances routes in such way that overcome to difficulties that exist as a result of limited refueling. Proposed MIP problem is then implemented by GAMS software. Finally, a sensitivity analysis is provided to evaluate the relationship between the problem structures and achieved solutions.

Keywords:

Ambulance Classification , Vehicle Routing Problem , Disaster Response , Service Time , Patient Grouping