Demand-Driven Districting to Improve Emergency Medical Services

Several management strategies have been proposed to reduce response time in Emergency Medical Services (EMS), e.g., districting and pre-assignment rules. However, districts are often a priori defined without considering the dynamics of service provisioning. This may create problems when ambulances must be sent out of their district to compensate local criticalities. To overcome this problem, we propose a support tool that minimizes out-of- district assignments while ensuring workload-balanced districts. The approach consists of an iterative matheuristic, that solves the operational problem (location/allocation of ambulances) for a given districting, and then we redistrict based on the operational solution.