LOCATION OF EMERGENCY STATIONS AS THE CAPACITATED P-MEDIAN PROBLEM

The access of patients to the emergency medical service depends mainly on the deployment of stations where ambulances stay. In the Slovak Republic, the location of stations is defined by the Ministry of Health for the whole state territory. Our previous research suggested that the service quality can be improved when the station location is proposed by solving the p-median problem, however in this solution there are significant differences in the load of individual ambulances. Therefore, it seems reasonable to limit the population allocated to one station in the problem formulation. This way, the problem of station location becomes a capacitated p-median problem. It can be efficiently solved using a matheuristic combining local optimisation approach with an IP solver. In the paper, our solution of the capacitated p-median problem is compared with the previously proposed deployment using computer simulation.