Road coverage as demand metric for ambulance allocation

Ambulances must be strategically placed to ensure timely patient care and save lives. The allocation problem considered in the current paper optimally distributes a fixed number of ambulances over predetermined bases with limited capacity. Ambulance allocation problems are usually solved through historical demand. In such cases, researchers process call record data that is shared by ambulance service providers. This paper proposes an alternative demand metric, namely the meters of covered road. Road network information is widely and publicly available, making it easily accessible. We demonstrate for a real ambulance region that the road coverage demand metric performs similarly to the historical call record metric in the case of static allocation, and that it outperforms when dynamic ambulance management is used.