Emergency vehicle routing in urban road networks with multistakeholder cooperation

Abstract

The lack of multistakeholder cooperation is one of the main challenges faced by emergency medical services (EMS). Especially in the ambulance routing process, inactive traffic operators fail to provide coordination to prioritize the ambulance, while ignoring the choice of hospitals will lead to inevitable patient transfer between hospitals. To provide efficient decision support for EMS, this paper considers daily ambulance routing problems in a network with high spatial resolution in which two advanced technologies are introduced: prehospital screening that provides patient injury diagnosis and lane preclearing that ensures the predefined driving speed of ambulances. Three different types of ambulances are used to transport and offer first aid to patients based on the screened results. To manage the ambulance fleet properly, a mixed-integer linear programming (MIP) model is proposed to assign vehicles to the injured and plan routes with the shortest travel time. A semisoft time window constraint is incorporated to reflect the late arrival penalty onsite and at hospitals. Because high-quality EMS responds to the call in seconds, a real-world case in Shenzhen, China, is presented to validate the computational performance by a commercial solver: the general algebraic modeling system (GAMS). In the case study, we further analyzed the effect of different stakeholders' involvement, like the hospitals and traffic operators. This information proves the efficiency of multistakeholder participation in ambulance routing.