Ambulance Allocation

Simulation-Based Ambulance Fleet Allocation

Author:
Yisong Yue <yisongyue@gmail.com>

Overview
This is the project page of the Data-Driven Simulation-based Ambulance Allocation project. In particular, we created a simulation of ambulance allocation outcomes that is amenable to allocation optimization. We proposed a simple greedy approach to ambulance allocation that can be shown to be near optimal. More information can be found in [1]. In particular, our simulator is described in Algorithm 1, and our static allocation approach is described in Algorithm 3.

Data
The static simulation dataset is available at

http://tinyurl.com/ke2uksg

This contains all the data necessary for running the static allocation experiments (Section 5 & Section 7.2 in [1]). We sampled 1500 request logs for those experiments. We used the first 500 for training, the next 500 for validation, and final 500 for testing (which is what we reported on).

Each request sample is formatted in 4 lines:

For example, in inputs/sample58_week_1.txt, the first 4 lines are:

This corresponds to request with request id 0, from district 67, and arriving at 2.33 minutes after simulation begins. There are 5 bases that can service this request, 39, 20, 50, 30, 36. The correspond base-to-scene and total round trip travel times of ambulances sent from each base correspond to the next two lines.

There are 58 bases (labeled 1-58) and 83 districts (labeled 1-83).

A couple of allocation files are given as well. There is the default_allocation.txt, which just assigns one ambulance to each base, and the greedy allocation optimizing cost C1.

The base-to-base travel times is located in base_travel_times.txt. These travel times are given in minutes, and are capped at 30 minutes (i.e., if it takes longer than 30 minutes to travel between bases, we define those two bases to not be traversable). This information was used in our dynamic simulation experiments.

References

[1] Yisong Yue, Lavanya Marla, and Ramayya Krishnan. An Efficient Simulation-based Approach to Ambulance Fleet Allocation and Dynamic Redeployment, In Proceedings of AAAI, 2012 [pdf]