Emergency response time minimization by incorporating ground and aerial transportation

In real life, many events may have severe effects on human being lives. These events can happen casually such as accident, heart attack or another severe disease, and deliberately like fights among people. From the engineering point of view, it does not matter what the reason of happening such events is, but the important thing is to rescue the affected people as much as possible in a short time and based on a scheduling point of view. In this study, we consider a real-life medical emergency service problem for a city with its known hospitals or medical care center locations. A limited number of ground and aerial vehicles, like ambulance and helicopter, are given to be assigned to these sites in which at most one vehicle from each type can be assigned. The aim is minimizing the total travel distances which are a function of the response time to the patients. To solve the problem, a mathematical formulation is proposed, and a metaheuristic solution method based on the genetic algorithm is developed, since the problem belongs to the NP-hard family of problems.