Emergency Medical System Design Using Kernel Search

The paper deals with location of the standby sites of emergency vehicles in a large-scale area. We propose a mathematical programming model that preserves the current number of vehicles and looks for better station location. The optimization criterion is to minimize the average response time. Large problem instances are intractable in a reasonable amount of time and that is why a modification of the kernel search heuristic is proposed to get an approximate solution. A computer simulation model is used to evaluate the current and the proposed system in the Slovak Republic. The model was calibrated using real data on emergency trips.