Allocation of emergency units response areas

Abstract

The average travel times for emergency units such as are engines, ambulances, and police patrol cars which respond to specially distributed incidence, is not necessarily minimized by always dispelling the closest available units in each incident. Methods are described for changing response areas so as to reduce average travel time and also reduce the imbalance of workload among units. The recent year optimization techniques have begun to be applied to problem of urban emergency service systems such as fire departments, police patrol systems, and ambulance services. This paper describes an example of such an application which has led to new principles for designing the response areas of emergency units.