An emergency vehicles allocation model for major industrial disasters

Abstract One of the main issues in the event of a major industrial disaster (fire, explosion or toxic gas dispersion) is to efficacy manage emergencies by considering both medical and logistics issues. From a logistics point of view the purpose of this work is to correctly address critical patients from the emergency site to the most suitable hospitals. A Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) Model is proposed, able to determine the optimal number and allocation of emergency vehicles involved in relief operations, in order to maximize the number of successfully treated injured patients. Moreover, a vehicles reallocation strategy has been developed which takes into account the evolution of the patients health conditions. Alternative scenarios have been tested considering a dynamic version of the Emergency Vehicles Allocation Problem, in which patient health conditions evolves during the rescue process. A company located in Italy has been considered as case-study in order to evaluate the performance of the proposed methodology.