Role of Parallelism in Ambulance Dispatching

The demand for emergency medical service (EMS) has been rising over time, leading to the need for efficient yet effective techniques for managing ambulance logistics. Ambulance dispatching decisions in EMS assign ambulances to calls such that the response time is minimized. A notion of parallelism is developed for ambulance dispatching decisions that allows considering both idle and busy ambulances in parallel rather than just idle ones. The parallelism, applied upon the centrality policy found in literature, results in the parallelized centrality policy complementing and enhancing the centrality policy. The experimental analysis evidences that the parallelism significantly reduces response time by up to 43.4% over the existing approaches that only consider idle ambulances.