On the integration of dispatching and covering for emergency vehicles management system

In the vehicle management systems, two important issues have to be considered by managers: the dispatching problem with the aim of minimizing the response time for current emergency calls; and the covering problem with the objective of keeping proper coverage to satisfy future calls in best times. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the value, in term of service quality, of integrating the dispatching and covering problems in the same model. A heuristic algorithm, combining Ant optimization and Tabu search, is used as a solution approach. Several numerical examples are used to compare the integrated approach and the non-integrated one.