A novel hybrid method for improving ambulance dispatching response time through a simulation study

• Proposing a hybrid approach based on important parameters for different environmental setting.
• Benefits of advantages of traditional methods via a linear combined technique.
• A detailed simulation based approach is built on a variety of scenarios to evaluate the response time of EMS.
• Investigate the optimality and importance of parameters for ambulance dispatching through different simulation environments.

Response time is the most important factor in evaluating the performance of various Emergency Medical Services (EMS). In this paper, a novel hybrid method has been proposed to improve response time for ambulance dispatching. The proposed approach uses a linear hybrid metric based on network centrality measures, nearest neighbor method and first-in first-out (FIFO) policy. Other important parameters in ambulance dispatching such as the operating environment, rate of incoming emergency calls, available resources, hospitalization probability of the patients as well as distances and locations of units are all part of information used in this proposed approach. In line with the traditional metrics used in previous works, we have adopted a linear combined metric which is adjusted according to environment parameters. Results of extensive simulation experiments show reductions in response time by as much as 42% as compared to previous methods.