Planning the locations of the emergency medical service stations in Istanbul

Response time is very crucial in case of events that require emergency medical services such as large-scale emergency needs, accidents, illnesses, etc. Since this service is directly related with life threatening incidences. Thus, the location planning of emergency facilities is crucial, especially in populated cities with heavy traffic such as Istanbul. In this paper, we discuss single and multi-period emergency station location problems faced by the Emergency Aid and Rescue Department at the Department of Fire Brigade of Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality. We propose the backup double covering model which is based on the well-known set covering and maximal covering location problems. Although the optimal solution for the single period model can be found using an optimization package, the problems necessitate efficient algorithms for large-scale instances involving a large number of decision variables and constraints as well as for the multi-period case. For this purpose, we investigate the performance of three heuristic methods and discuss the results.