Managing a Fleet of Ambulances to Respond to Emergency and Transfer Patient Transportation Demands

Abstract

Organizations of pre-hospital emergency medical services have as first mission to provide medical assistance to patients including transport to medical centers if necessary, and a second one that concerns the transfers of patients from one medical facility to another one. Most organizations in Canada and in North-America use two independent fleets to perform these missions. Although operating two separated fleets seems easier to do, it appears to be less efficient than an integrated fleet management approach able to deal with both types of demands. Taking this into consideration, this paper aims to design and evaluate the performance of three management approaches. This is a very challenging problem, since it involves solving simultaneously two difficult vehicle routing problems: an ambulance relocation problem and a dial a ride problem.

Shuttle bus service routing: A systematic literature review

“…Then, they used the variable neighborhood descend (VND) method, which is a kind of VNS, and a greedy algorithm for solving large instances of the SBRP. Kergosien et al [26] used TS algorithms with VNS which is built by a swap operator in the field of patient/hospital. Euchi and Mraihi [27] developed a hybrid method by applying Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) and VNS.…”

The median routing problem for simultaneous planning of emergency response and non-emergency jobs

“…For ambulances, the combined planning of emergency response and non-emergency patient transportation has received some attention. Kergosien, Gendreau, Ruiz, and Soriano (2014) study when and from which hospital to temporarily expend emergency ambulances on non-emergency transportation, as do van den Berg and Van Essen (2019) . They seek to minimise the temporary loss in emergency response coverage when performing non-emergency transportation.…”

Scheduling Non-Urgent Patient Transportation While Maximizing Emergency Coverage

“…During this optimization step, performed by a constructive heuristic approach, the routing costs and response time for serving emergency patients are minimized. Kergosien et al (2014Kergosien et al ( , 2015 developed a discrete event simulationbased analysis tool that incorporates both emergency requests and non-urgent transportation requests that arrive dynamically during the day. Kergosien et al (2014) consider three strategies for dealing with these requests.…”

“…Kergosien et al (2014Kergosien et al ( , 2015 developed a discrete event simulationbased analysis tool that incorporates both emergency requests and non-urgent transportation requests that arrive dynamically during the day. Kergosien et al (2014) consider three strategies for dealing with these requests. In the first strategy, both types of requests are served by a dedicated ambulance fleet.…”

“…None of the mentioned papers discusses the situation considered in this paper, where the fleet of ALS ambulances can be used for both types of requests, and the BLS ambulance fleet can be used only for nonurgent transportation requests. Even though Kiechle et al (2009) and Kergosien et al (2014Kergosien et al ( , 2015 aim at maximizing the remaining coverage for emergency calls, no decision has to be made regarding the fleet that will serve a non-urgent transportation request. However, this decision is crucial in maximizing the remaining coverage for emergency calls, and thus the van den Berg and van Essen: Scheduling Non-Urgent Patient Transportation Transportation Science, 2019, vol.…”