Deployment and redeployment of ambulances using a heuristic method and an Ant Colony Optimization — Case study

Abstract

The management of pre hospital logistics is addressed by several researchers. That is due to the big impact that has healthcare around the city development. Thus, optimizing emergency traffic helps to smart cities growth. This paper includes coverage problems existing in literature and addresses the ambulance allocation to cover sectors in Casablanca region of Morocco and minimize the lateness of emergency intervention. Our work proposes a comparison between a heuristic method and an ACO `Ant Colony Optimization' algorithm. Instances are given by real data of the existing emergency location in Casablanca region. As a result, the ACO hybridized by a guided local search provides a distribution of ambulances at potential waiting site (hospital and fire station), and minimizes the total lateness of emergency intervention. The ACO gives best results than the heuristic.