Dynamic coordination of ambulances for emergency medical assistance services

The main objective of emergency medical assistance (EMA) services is to attend patients with sudden diseases at any possible location within an area of influence. This usually consists in providing "in situ" assistance and, if necessary, the transport of the patient to a medical center. The potential of such systems to reduce mortality is directly related to the travel times of ambulances to emergency patients. An efficient coordination of the ambulance fleet of an EMA service is crucial for reducing the average travel times. In this paper we propose mechanisms that dynamically improve the allocation of ambulances to patients as well as the redeployment of available ambulances in the region under consideration. We test these mechanisms in different experiments using historical data from the EMA service of the Autonomous Region of Madrid in Spain: SUMMA112. The results empirically confirm that our proposal reduces the average response times of EMA services significantly. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.