Finding optimal ambulance parking spots in an urban area using artificial intelligence

Over time, the protection and health services of each country face increasing challenges in sending mobile units to the scene of an emergency. In civil protection emergencies, immediate coverage of incidents in multiple locations is required, creating a complex problem as the number of mobile units is finite. However, there is also a need to improve the existing operational system due to the population growth in large urban centres and the small number of mobile units available in small urban centres. This paper therefore attempts to approach a solution to this problem structured around the placement of mobile health units at selected locations within a city using artificial intelligence tools, specifically clustering, to identify possible ambulance parking spots and the simulated annealing algorithm in order to highlight the optimal solution. The criterion of the optimization is the detection of ambulance parking locations in order to minimise the overall average response time.