DEVELOPING AND VALIDATING A DECISION-SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR LOCATING EMERGENCY MEDICAL VEHICLES IN LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY

Decreasing the elapsed time to respond to an emergency is a goal of Emergency Medical Services (EMS). The size of the ambulance fleet and the location of ambulances within the service area are two factors that the EMS planners can control; these two factors directly affect the systems response time and contribute to the attainment of this goal. In this paper, a maximal expected coverage location model with time variation (TIMEXCLP) is developed and integrated into a decision support system (DSS) to aid EMS planners to allocate vehicles within their service area. In applying TIMEXCLP to the Louisville, Kentucky, EMS system, response time was decreased by 36%.