The role of centrality in ambulance dispatching

An ambulance dispatching policy, Centrality policy, is proposed in an effort to reduce the response time in demanding emergency situations such as in natural disasters, based on the notion of centrality from the study on complex networks. The nearest neighbor (NN) policy prioritizes the emergency calls by closeness and it has been known effective in the literature. The NN policy is evolved into the Centrality policy by prioritizing the calls based on the centrality in addition to the closeness. The centrality enables to capture the efficiency of a call site in reaching out other current and future calls thus secure the long‐term performance beyond the immediate performance pursued by the NN policy. Two parameters are associated with the Centrality policy: weight on centrality and choice of centrality measure. An extensive simulation‐based sensitivity analysis is conducted on the algorithmic parameters to examine the role of centrality in ambulance dispatching. The analysis evidences the potential of centrality consideration in reducing the response time beyond the NN policy, given that these parameters are appropriately chosen.