EURO 2024 Copenhagen
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2384. Modeling Fairness in Covering Problems of Emergency Medical Service Location Planning

Invited abstract in session MA-10: EMS logistics, stream OR in Health Services (ORAHS).

Monday, 8:30-10:00
Room: 11 (building: 116)

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

Emergency medical service (EMS) has to respond quickly and efficiently to all emergencies within a considered area. However, especially in areas with heterogeneous demand distribution, like urban, mixed and rural areas, the level of coverage can vary widely. To reduce inequalities in coverage, many approaches take into account fairness as model objective by explicitly addressing the coverage of the worst-covered area. Thereby, the coverage levels of the second, third etc. worst-covered areas are not directly addressed.
Therefore, we propose to maximize the average expected coverage of the set p of worst-covered areas. Our model explicitly considers the second, third etc. worst-covered area and aims to improve not only the coverage level of the worst-covered area, but the average coverage level of the set p of worst-covered areas.
Our fairness objective’s applicability is analyzed at hand of a real-world case study for the city of Duisburg (Germany). We examine different sets p of worst-covered areas to analyze the influence on the individual coverage levels of the different areas. First results show that the proposed fairness objective can improve the average coverage of the set p of worst-covered areas in EMS location planning context. At the same time, computational complexity of our model is low enough to maintain solution quality.

Keywords

Status: accepted

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