Empirical Spatial Density-Based Emergency Medical Service Demand Forecast for Ambulance Allocation

In a previous study, we solved the two-fold dynamic ambulance allocation problem, including forecasting the distribution of Emergency Medical Service (EMS) requesters and dynamically allocating ambulances according to the predicted distribution of requesters. In the definition of the coverage region, the Euclidean distance was used, which is not suitable for measuring the length of a route between two places. This study improved on the previous one by redefining the coverage region for practical application and providing a simulation model to verify the effectiveness of the proposed ambulance allocation method. The simulation results show the proposed allocation method providing higher demand coverage rates and shorter response distances than the official allocation.