Enhancing Concurrent Emergency Response: Joint Scheduling of Emergency Vehicles on Freeways with Tailored Heuristic

Abstract

Scheduling decisions for concurrent emergency response (CER) across multiple disaster sites presents numerous difficulties. The main challenge is to minimize human casualties while taking into account the rationality of resource allocation across different disaster sites. This paper establishes a joint scheduling model for emergency vehicles on freeways in the context of CER. The model aims to minimize the transportation time, dispatch cost, and casualty risk, by using the resource site scheduling scheme as the decision variable, addressing multiple disaster and resource sites. Specifically, a casualty risk function based on the rescue waiting time was designed to balance the competing needs among various disaster sites, enhance equitable resource allocation, and reduce the probability of casualties. To achieve global convergence in a high-dimensional solution space, a tailored heuristic algorithm called adaptive dual evolutionary particle swarm optimization (ADEPSO) is proposed. The numerical results show that the scheduling scheme proposed by the ADEPSO algorithm satisfies all constraints and demonstrates significant advantages in large-sized instances. Compared to the two basic algorithms, ADEPSO provides a more cost-effective scheme and reduces the average rescue waiting time. Moreover, integrating the casualty risk function significantly decreases the average rescue waiting time at both high- and low-priority disaster sites, thereby directly lowering the casualty risk.