Coordination in Emergency Response System Design: An Application to Hazardous Materials Transportation

Emergency response, in most cases, requires the coordination of multiple teams often including the emergency medical technicians, the fire fighters, and the police. Although there is a well-established literature on designing emergency response networks, the need to coordinate the multiple resources involved in this effort is largely overlooked. Such coordination requires not only the response time of each resource to the emergency, but the amount of time the teams may have to wait for each other. In this paper, we present a mathematical model for the two-resource maximal covering problem, and devise a genetic algorithm for solving large-scale problem instances. We provide a case study focusing on designing the response to hazardous materials incidents in Chengdu City, China. Our numerical experiments highlight the possibility of improving the current situation by merely reallocating the ambulance and emergency stations to different population zones. We also demonstrate how drastic improvements can be achieved by the establishment of new response facilities.