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The EMS vehicle patient transportation problem during a demand surge

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  • Farshad Majzoubi

    (Lyft Inc.)

  • Lihui Bai

    (University of Louisville)

  • Sunderesh S. Heragu

    (Oklahoma State University)

Abstract

We consider a real-time emergency medical service (EMS) vehicle patient transportation problem in which vehicles are assigned to patients so they can be transported to hospitals during an emergency. The objective is to minimize the total travel time of all vehicles while satisfying two types of time window constraints. The first requires each EMS vehicle to arrive at a patient’s location within a specified time window. The second requires the vehicle to arrive at the designated hospital within another time window. We allow an EMS vehicle to serve up to two patients instead of just one. The problem is shown to be NP-complete. We, therefore, develop a simulated annealing (SA) heuristic for efficient solution in real-time. A column generation algorithm is developed for determining a tight lower bound. Numerical results show that the proposed SA heuristic provides high-quality solutions in much less CPU time, when compared to the general-purpose solver. Therefore, it is suitable for implementation in a real-time decision support system, which is available via a web portal ( www.rtdss.org ).

Suggested Citation

  • Farshad Majzoubi & Lihui Bai & Sunderesh S. Heragu, 2021. "The EMS vehicle patient transportation problem during a demand surge," Journal of Global Optimization, Springer, vol. 79(4), pages 989-1006, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:jglopt:v:79:y:2021:i:4:d:10.1007_s10898-020-00965-1
    DOI: 10.1007/s10898-020-00965-1
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

    1. Yaoting Huang & Boyu Chen & Wenlian Lu & Zhong-Xiao Jin & Ren Zheng, 2022. "Asynchronous optimization of part logistics routing problem," Journal of Global Optimization, Springer, vol. 82(4), pages 803-834, April.
    2. Keyong Lin & S. Nurmaya Musa & Hwa Jen Yap, 2022. "Vehicle Routing Optimization for Pandemic Containment: A Systematic Review on Applications and Solution Approaches," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 14(4), pages 1-27, February.

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    Keywords

    Vehicle routing; Meta-heuristics;

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