Performance Evaluation of Tehran-Qom Highway Emergency Medical Service System Using Hypercube Queuing Model

摘要

This paper studies the ambulance deployment of the Tehran-Qom highway emergency medical service (EMS) system. The response time of EMS to an emergency call can have impact on the users in terms of the life and death, and this performance metric is evaluated using the proposed hypercube queuing model. The model is based on spatially distributed queuing theory and Markovian analysis approximations, and it is one of the most effective approaches for analyzing emergency response systems. In this research, performance measures of the EMS including workloads and mean response times are evaluated using the hypercube model. Modification to the existing system configuration is applied to improve the system performance. We also analyze the effects of small variation in the system inputs, such as user demands rates, to investigate the robustness of the outputs. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model in supporting design and operational decisions, in particular in reducing the ambulances' workload imbalances as well as mean user response time.