A Heuristic Approach for Locating EMS Facilities and Vehicles

Many industries thrive on their ability to provide rapid and efficient services to customers. Attaining this goal is particularly critical for life sensitive service providers like fire departments and emergency medical services (EMS). This issue is complicated by the possibility that a vehicle may be unavailable when called for service. In this paper we analyze current techniques for locating EMS and highlight some of the problems associated with these methods. We propose a genetic algorithm to locate emergency facilities and vehicles to minimize the number of locations which cannot be covered in a specified time. Our proposed genetic algorithm is driven by the evaluation of the fitness of chromosomes through a discrete event simulation model. This method of evaluating the fitness of the chromosomes is used because of the difficulty of evaluating the required probabilities. We believe that our approach will lead to a general cost efficient technique for locating EMS.