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To cover an area of interest by an autonomous vehicle, such as an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), planning a coverage path which guides the unit to cover the area is an essential process. However, coverage path planning is often problematic, especially when the boundary of the area is complicated and the area contains several obstacles. A common solution for this situation is to decompose the area into disjoint convex sub-polygons and to obtain coverage paths for each sub-polygon using a simple back-and-forth pattern. Aligned with the solution approach, we propose a new convex decomposition method which is simple and applicable to any shape of target area. The proposed method is designed based on the idea that, given an area of interest represented as a polygon, a convex decomposition of the polygon mainly occurs at the points where an interior angle between two edges of the polygon is greater than 180 degrees. The performance of the proposed method is demonstrated by comparison with existing convex decomposition methods using illustrative examples.

Emergency Medical Service (EMS) consists of a chain of processes that encompass the on-scene management, patient transport, and care provision at an ED. Much research has been conducted in order to improve EMS design, and simulations are commonly used to evaluate EMS design. In many cases, a specific component of an EMS system is selected to model aspects relevant to the analysis, while the other EMS components are treated as model inputs and assumptions. This could lead to a fragmentary assessment because it does not capture the complexity of real EMS operations. Ideally, EMS designs should be evaluated by a model that represents the entire chain of EMS operations. In this paper, a wide spectrum of operation design problems of EMS systems and simulation models used in previous studies are examined. Then, a set of modeling requirements are defined and a model framework is proposed for EMS system design evaluator.