Ambulance Service Planning: Simulation and Data Visualisation

The ambulance-planning problem includes operational decisions such as choice of dispatching policy, strategic decisions such as where ambulances should be stationed and at what times they should operate, and tactical decisions such as station location selection. Any solution to this problem requires careful balancing of political, economic and medical objectives. Quantitative decision processes are becoming increasingly important in providing public accountability for the resource decisions that have to be made. This chapter discusses a simulation and analysis software tool ‘BartSim’ that was developed as a decision support tool for use within the St. John Ambulance Service (Auckland Region) in New Zealand (St. Johns). The novel features incorporated within this study include the use of a detailed time-varying travel model for modelling travel times in the simulation, methods for reducing the computational overhead associated with computing time-dependent shortest paths in the travel model, the direct reuse of real data as recorded in a database (trace-driven simulation), and the development of a geographic information sub-system (GIS) within BartSim that provides spatial visualisation of both historical data and the results of what-if simulations.

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