A new model and tabu search approach for planning the emergency service stations

The location planning of emergency service stations is crucial, especially in the populated cities with heavy trafic conditions such as Istanbul. In this paper, we propose a Backup Double Covering Model (BDCM), a variant of the well-known Maximal Covering Location Problem, that requires two types of services to plan the emergency service stations. The objective of the model is to maximize the total population serviced using two distinct emergency service stations in different time limits where the total number of stations is limited. We propose a Tabu Search (TS) approach to solve the problem. We conduct an extensive experimental study on randomly generated data set with different parameters to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. Finally, we apply our TS approach for planning the emergency service stations in Istanbul.