Article ID: | iaor19931397 |
Country: | United States |
Volume: | 39 |
Issue: | 6 |
Start Page Number: | 903 |
End Page Number: | 916 |
Publication Date: | Nov 1991 |
Journal: | Operations Research |
Authors: | Goldberg Jeffrey, Szidarovsky Ferenc |
Keywords: | queues: applications, law & law enforcement |
In this paper the authors present two iterative methods for solving a model to evaluate busy probabilities for Emergency Medical Service (EMS) vehicles. The model considers location dependent service times and is an alternative to the mean service calibration method; a procedure, used with the Hypercube Model, to accommodate travel times and location-dependent service times. The authors use monotonicity arguments to pove that one iterative method always converges to a solution. A large computational experiment suggests that both methods work satisfactorily in EMS systems with low ambulance busy probabilities and the method that always converges to a solution performs significantly better in EMS systems with high busy probabilities.