108. Enhancing Fairness in Emergency Medical Services: Single- and Bi-Objective Model Formulations
Invited abstract in session TD-12: Scheduling in Healthcare I, stream Health Care Management.
Thursday, 14:30-16:00Room: H10
Authors (first author is the speaker)
| 1. | Isabel Wiemer
|
| Chair of Business Administration and Production Management, University Duisburg-Essen | |
| 2. | Jutta Geldermann
|
| Chair of Business Administration and Production Management, University of Duisburg-Essen |
Abstract
The primary goal of emergency medical services (EMS) is to respond quickly and efficiently to emergencies within a given area. However, in regions with a heterogeneous demand distribution—such as urban, mixed, and rural areas—coverage levels can vary widely. To reduce inequalities in coverage, many approaches incorporate fairness as model objective when planning EMS locations. One common strategy is to focus on the least-covered area by maximizing its expected coverage. However, this approach does not directly address the coverage levels of the second, third, and subsequent least-covered areas, potentially leaving broader disparities unaddressed.
Therefore, we propose explicitly considering not only the worst-covered area but also the second, third, and subsequent least-covered areas. Our goal is to enhance the average coverage level across the set p of worst-covered areas. To that end, we introduce a novel fairness objective and formulate a single-objective model. Additionally, we integrate this objective with expected coverage in a bi-objective model, utilizing the epsilon constraint method to balance fairness and overall coverage.
To evaluate our fairness objective’s applicability, we conduct a case study for the city of Duisburg, Germany, with real-world emergency data from three consecutive years. We analyze various sets p of the worst-covered areas and different epsilon values to evaluate individual coverage levels as well as overall expected coverage. Preliminary results indicate that our proposed fairness objective enhances the average coverage of the worst-served areas in Duisburg while maintaining a high level of overall efficiency.
Keywords
- Health Care
- Location
Status: accepted
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