Simulation Analysis of the Break Assignment Problem Considering Area Coverage in Emergency Fleets

Real time allocation of vehicles to incidents in emergency fleets is a challenging optimization problem due to time and location uncertainty in incident appearance. In addition, to ensure high responsiveness and efficiency of emergency vehicle crews, their work shifts need to be well balanced with enough break times. These two aspects are simultaneously taken into consideration in Break Assignment Problem Considering Area Coverage (BAPCAC) proposed by Lujak et al. in [1]. Because of its multiple dimensionality and complex mixed linear integer programming structure, this problem is computationally expensive. In this paper, we test in simulations the performance of the BAPCAC problem and propose a simplification of the model so that it can be solved in close-to real time.