Locating Emergency Services With Priority Rules: The Priority Queuing Covering Location Problem

22 Pages Posted: 13 Mar 2007

See all articles by Francisco J. F. Silva

Francisco J. F. Silva

University of the Azores - Department of Economics and Business

Daniel Serra

Universitat Pompeu Fabra - Faculty of Economic and Business Sciences

Date Written: September 2002

Abstract

Previous emergency service covering models consider all the calls to be of the same importance and impose the same waiting time constraints independently of the service's priority. This type of constraint is clearly inappropriate in many contexts. For example, in urban medical emergency services, calls that involve danger to human life deserve higher priority over calls for more routine incidents. A realistic model in such a context should allow prioritizing the calls for service. In this paper a covering model which considers different priority levels is formulated and solved. The model inherits its formulation from previous research in Maximum Coverage Models and incorporates results from Queuing Theory, in particular Priority Queuing. The additional complexity incorporated in the model justifies the use of a heuristic procedure. An exhaustive evaluation of the heuristics, based in simulated networks, is developed and a numerical example illustrates the functionality of the model. Results are compared with those obtained with a model that does not consider different priorities.

Keywords: Emergency services, location and queuing, covering models

JEL Classification: C61, L80

Suggested Citation

Silva, Francisco J. F. and Serra, Daniel, Locating Emergency Services With Priority Rules: The Priority Queuing Covering Location Problem (September 2002). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=969971 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.969971

Francisco J. F. Silva (Contact Author)

University of the Azores - Department of Economics and Business ( email )

9501-801 Ponta Delgada Azores
Portugal

Daniel Serra

Universitat Pompeu Fabra - Faculty of Economic and Business Sciences ( email )

Ramon Trias Fargas 25-27
Barcelona, 08005
Spain
(34) 93 542 16 66 (Phone)
(34) 93 542 17 46 (Fax)

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