Scheduling ambulances

Urgences Santé is the public agency responsible for coordinating ambulances in the Montréal area. One of its responsibilities is long-term scheduling of ambulances and technicians. After demand has been forecast and the associated number of required vehicles for each hour of a typical week has been defined, Urgences Santé rents the ambulances from 15 private owners and distributes the working hours accordingly. The complexity of the problem has led to the quest for a systematic optimization approach. The implementation of this new scheduling method has two major impacts: savings and improvement of the technicians’ schedule.