INTEGRATED EMERGENCY VEHICLE DISPATCHING AND COVERING: A PARALLEL ANT-TABU APPROACH

In this paper, we develop a parallel solution to solve an integrated dispatching and covering problem for emergency vehicle fleet management system. The basic sequential algorithm is a coupled Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) with Tabu Search heuristic. To speed up this algorithm, we develop a master slave ACS parallel version based on the parallel neighbourhood evaluation approach for the tabu procedure. In experiments we compare synchronization strategies between the parallel processes, and we show the impact of inter processes communication frequency and the information exchanged on the efficiency of the algorithm.