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Vehicle location models for Emergency Medical Services. An application for a Colombian company

Vehicle location models for Emergency Medical Services. An application for a Colombian company



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Vehicle location models for Emergency Medical Services. An application for a Colombian company. (2018). Revista EIA, 15(29), 31-46. https://doi.org/10.24050/reia.v15i29.1211

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The authors exclusively assign to the Universidad EIA, with the power to assign to third parties, all the exploitation rights that derive from the works that are accepted for publication in the Revista EIA, as well as in any product derived from it and, in in particular, those of reproduction, distribution, public communication (including interactive making available) and transformation (including adaptation, modification and, where appropriate, translation), for all types of exploitation (by way of example and not limitation : in paper, electronic, online, computer or audiovisual format, as well as in any other format, even for promotional or advertising purposes and / or for the production of derivative products), for a worldwide territorial scope and for the entire duration of the rights provided for in the current published text of the Intellectual Property Law. This assignment will be made by the authors without the right to any type of remuneration or compensation.

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Ambulance location, in a certain area of coverage, is a key element in reducing the waiting time of a potential patient and the initiation a healthcare service in Emergency Medical Services (EMS). The Operations Research area, developing and solving adequate mathematical models, helps to make good decisions in EMS. We propose two variants of a Mixed Integer Linear Programming model for locating heterogeneous fleet vehicles to support different types of services in emergency medical care, taking into account the operational requirements of a health care service company in Colombia. The proposed models do not exactly match any of those found in the literature. The models are solved with Gurobi solver and the modeling language AMPL and they are successfully validated with historical data of the company under study and some estimates based on external sources. These obtained results are compared using an adaptation of the concept of Preparedness taken from the literature for ambulance positioning, as regard to measure the readiness of the system to the expected demand. The new results show that the relevance of each model depends of the prioritization of services and/or areas that the company considers.

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