Improving emergency medical dispatching by means of the Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search

Dispatching ambulances is a demanding and stressful task for dispatchers. The aim of this work was to investigate if and to what extent the dispatch operation of the Red Cross Salzburg (RCS) can be optimized with a computerized system. The basic problem of a dynamic multi-vehicle Dial-a-Ride Problem (DARP) with time windows was enhanced according to the requirements of the RCS. The objective was to minimize the total mileage covered by ambulances and the waiting time of patients. Consequently, the problem was solved by using the Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search (ALNS). Evaluation results indicate that the system outperforms a human dispatcher by between 2.5% and 36% within 1 minute of runtime.