Simulation of dispatching and allocation of ambulances for emergency medical services in urban areas

Emergency Medical Service (EMS) Systems provide pre-hospital emergency care services to patients and injured. Needed time in order to respond to an emergency call (arrival time to the scene of the accident) is one of the most important aspects of EMS service facility. Optimal planning of resources for rapid response has been made difficult due to the random number of ambulance requests and operational constraints. This difficulty is particularly important in the dispatching and allocation of ambulances in the urban area. In the present study, simulation modeling has been used to plan the dispatching and allocation of ambulances in the urban area. In order to achieve rapid response, the modeling prioritizes emergency calls to cover specific patients, such as heart patients, in the shortest possible time. The study has used ED simulation software for dispatching modeling of emergency servers at a city level with different demand points and random distribution functions for demand and service rate of servers. In this regard, two scenarios have been developed that have been repeated to the required number and then compared using statistical methods according to performance criteria such as patients' probability of survival, mean response time and service time. In this study, the best-case scenario is that by deploying a variable server at each base in order to response emergency, it improves responsiveness and performance measures.