ORAHS2024
Abstract Submission

137. A Bi-Objective Covering Location Model for Improving Fairness in Emergency Medical Service Systems

Contributed abstract in session HC-3: Emergency Medical Services, stream Regular talks.

Thursday, 14:00-15:30
Room: Room S2

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 fairness objective 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. We combine our novel fairness objective with expected coverage to a bi-objective optimization model using the epsilon constraint method. In that way, we aim at maintaining an acceptable level of overall coverage.
Our model’s applicability is analyzed at hand of a real-world case study for the city of Duisburg (Germany). We examine different levels of overall coverage to analyze the influence on the individual coverage levels of the different areas. First results show that the proposed fairness model can improve the average coverage of the set p of worst-covered areas without giving up too much efficiency.

Keywords

Status: accepted

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