On-line ambulance dispatching heuristics with the consideration of triage.

In a medical priority dispatch system (MPDS), all calls for ambulance services are categorized according to the seriousness of the patient's illness or injury. MPDS could reduce response times to those who are seriously ill. This study develops a dynamic dispatching model which solves the allocation and reallocation subproblems simultaneously. A deterministic dynamicmodel which incorporates both current and future demands, and a stochasticmodel introduced to handle uncertainties in forecast demand are described. The solution methodology is presented. To demonstrate the relative performance of the proposed methodology, a simulation model is set up to test against different scenarios, including deterministic and stochastic scenarios. The resulting model is considered particularly useful in near-capacityconditions of ambulance dispatching, in which the tactical locations of medical centres and fleet of ambulances are already fixed. For the coveringabstract see ITRD E144727. Reprinted by permission of Elsevier.