Recent Advances in Emergency Medical Services Management

This article discusses different modelling approaches considered to address problems related to ambulances' location and relocation as well as dispatching decisions arising in Emergency Medical Services (EMS) management. Over the past 10 years, a considerable amount of research has been devoted to this field and specifically, to the development of strategies that more explicitly take into account the uncertainty and dynamism inherent to EMS. This article thus reviews the most recent advances related to EMS management from an operational level standpoint. It briefly reviews early works on static ambulances' location problems and presents new modelling and solution strategies proposed to address it. However, it intends to concentrate on relocation strategies and dispatching rules, and discuss the interaction between these two types of decisions. Finally, conclusions and perspectives are presented.