Waiting Strategies for Regular and Emergency Patient Transportation

Summary

Many emergency service providers, especially ambulance departments and companies who provide non-public maintenance services, face the problem that their eet of vehicles has to provide two different types of services: 1. Cover a certain region and provide immediate service when an emergency occurs; 2. Provide some regular service (e.g., the pick-up and delivery of patients, predetermined service tasks, periodic pick-ups . . . ). This is the current situation for the largest Austrian emergency service providers (e.g., the Austrian Red Cross), where the same eet is used to provide both types of services. Dynamic aspects thus directly inuence the schedule for the regular service. When an emergency occurs and an ambulance is required, the vehicle with the shortest distance to the emergency is assigned to serve the emergency patient. Therefore, it may happen that an ambulance vehicle that has to carry out a scheduled transport order of a patient, which has not started yet, is used to serve the emergency request and the schedule for the regular services has to be re-optimized and another vehicle has to be reassigned to the regular patient. Ambulances that carry out emergency transport become available at the hospital after the emergency service and can be then used to carry out regular transport orders. Again, the schedule for regular services has to be re-optimized.