Centrality‐based ambulance dispatching for demanding emergency situations

One category of dispatching decisions in emergency medical service involves the selection of an ambulance among idle units when a call is received (call‐initiated), and another involves the selection of a call among those waiting when a unit gets freed (ambulance‐initiated). This research focuses on the ambulance‐initiated dispatching and aims at developing a rule that can be flexibly used in various contexts characterized by the probability of transferring the patient to hospital. The idea behind this rule is to give a higher priority to the call that is more centrally located with respect to other calls. When the centrality along with the closeness is used to prioritize calls, the units would smoothly proceed towards dense regions while efficiently exploiting calls, thereby keeping the completion rate at maximum. This centrality‐based dispatching rule is tested in various scenarios and demonstrates considerable reductions in both average and variation of response time.