The efficient operation of emergency medical services is critical for any society. Typically, optimisation and simulation models support decisions on emergency ambulance stations’ locations and ambulance management strategies. Essential inputs for such models are the spatiotemporal characteristics of ambulance trips. Access to data on the movements of ambulances is limited, and therefore modelling efforts often rely on assumptions (e.g., the Euclidean distance is used as a surrogate of the ambulance travel time; the closest available ambulance is dispatched to a call; or the travel time estimates, offered by application programming interfaces for ordinary vehicles, are applied to ambulances). These simplifying assumptions are often based on incomplete data or common sense without being fully supported by the evidence. Thus, data-driven research to model ambulance trips is required. We investigated a unique dataset of global positioning system-based measurements collected from seventeen emergency ambulances over three years. We enriched the data by exploring external sources and designed a rule-based procedure to extract ambulance trips for emergency cases. Trips were split into training and test sets. The training set was used to develop a series of statistical models that capture the spatiotemporal characteristics of emergency ambulance trips. The models were used to generate synthetic ambulance trips, and those were compared with the test set to decide which models are the most suitable and to evaluate degrees to which they fit the statistical properties of real-world trips. As confirmed by the low values of the Kullback–Leibler divergence (0.004–0.229) and by the Kolmogorov–Smirnov test at the significance level of 0.05, we found a very good fit between the probability distributions of spatiotemporal properties of synthetic and real trips. A reasonable modelling choice is a model where the exponential dependency on the population density is used to locate emergency cases, emergency cases are allocated to hospitals following empirical probabilities, and ambulances are routed using the fastest paths. The models we developed can be used in optimisations and simulations to improve their validity.
This paper deals with p-location problem solving processes based on a decomposition, which separates the creation of a uniformly deployed set of p-location problems from the solution of the p-location problem for that specific instance. The research presented in this paper is focused on methods of construction of uniformly deployed sets of solutions and the examination of their impact on the efficiency of subsequent optimization algorithms. The approaches to the construction are used for the constitution of predetermined families of uniformly deployed sets of p-location problem solutions, which have standard sizes. We introduce two methods of uniformly deployed set construction: the first one is based on composition, followed by an enlargement process; and the second one makes use of voltage graphs. The construction approaches are completed by an algorithm, which adjusts the set of solutions to the sizes of a solved instance. The influence of a set construction approach on solving process efficiency is studied on real-world benchmarks, which include both the p-median objective function and the generalized disutility function. The solving process is performed alternatively using the swap or path-relinking based methods. Results of the computational study obtained by all combinations of the mentioned approaches are presented and evaluated in the concluding part of the paper to make the studied characteristics visible.
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