Network based temporary facility location for the Emergency Medical Services considering the disaster induced demand and the transportation infrastructure in disaster response

Pre-hospital Emergency Medical Service (EMS) provides the immediate and appropriate aid to patients in emergencies. As part of the traditional triad of first responders, EMS plays an important role in disaster response. In this work, the transportation infrastructure, which the EMS is dependent on, is considered. The objective of this research is to improve the effectiveness of EMS after the disaster by applying integer programming and the network based partitioning to determine temporary locations for on-post EMS facilities. Integer Programming problems are formed for the optimization problem in different scales, and the Lagrangian Relaxation is adapted to extend the problem further into larger scale. Network based partitioning of demands are also proposed and tested. Numerical results are provided, and a case study is presented. In the case study, the facility location problem takes into consideration of both disaster triggered and usual EMS demand that forms a worst case scenario. The analytical results are expected to facilitate decision making, and to serve as benchmarks for the planning of post-disaster EMS. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.