Date of Award
8-2011
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Legacy Department
Industrial Engineering
Committee Chair/Advisor
Mayorga, Maria E.
Committee Member
Wiecek , Margaret M.
Committee Member
Kurz , Mary E.
Committee Member
Ferrell , William G.
Abstract
Emergency medical service (EMS) systems respond to emergency or urgent calls so as to provide immediate care, such as pre-hospital care and/or transportation, to hospitals. Care must be provided in a timely manner; in fact quality of service is usually directly associated with response time. To reduce the response time, the number and location of vehicles within the service area are important variables. However with limited capacity, increasing the number of vehicles is often an infeasible alternative. Therefore, a critical design goal is to decide at which facilities stations should be located in order to serve as much demand as possible in a reasonable time, and at the same time maintain equitable service between customers. This study aims to focus on locating ambulances which respond to 911 calls in EMS systems. The goals are to find the optimal base station location for vehicles so that the number of calls or customers served is maximized while disparity between those customers is minimized, to consider the survival rate of patients directly in the model, and develop appropriate meta-heuristics for solving problems which cannot be solved optimally.
Recommended Citation
Chanta, Sunarin, "IMPROVING QUALITY OF SERVICE IN EMS SYSTEMS BY REDUCING DISPARITIES BETWEEN SERVICE ZONES" (2011). All Dissertations. 808.
https://open.clemson.edu/all_dissertations/808