Research On Ambulance Routing For Emergency Response Based On Ant Colony Optimization And Preferences

In China,with the rapid economic development and the accelerated urbanization,the Chinese government faces increasing pressure on resource,environment,and ecology.Especially in recent years,natural disasters occurred increasingly frequently in China and caused great loss of life and property.Accordingly,how to effectively generate reasonable emergency rescue schemes,which determines the success or failure of emergency rescue and has an important practical significance in protecting life and property,reducing economic damage,and maintaining social stability,has been one of the most fundamental and essential problems in emergency decision-making.This dissertation focuses on the ambulance routing for emergency rescue in the field of emergency decision-making.The main contributions of this dissertation are shown as below:(1)First of all,the research significance and goal of the ambulance routing for emergency rescue are discussed.This dissertation summarizes the main research contents,analyzes the research progress and existing problems,and looks forward to the future research direction.(2)Next,considering the scarce working ambulances,this dissertation introduces a model of ambulance routing for multiple casualties and multiple hospitals.Then,ant colony optimization(ACO)is adopted to solve the model.Specifically,in the search process of ACO,all the wounded are graded according to the degree of injury,so that the ambulance can pay the utmost attention to the seriously injured patients.Besides,to optimize the routing for multiple ambulances concurrently,the pheromone update and node selection in ACO are improved.The experimental results show that the proposed heuristic ACO can not only deal with the routing of the scarce working ambulances,but also can provide better rescue route and shorter rescue completion time than the existing greedy algorithm.(3)Last,the model of ambulance routing is improved based on the ideal of ambulance grading.Inspired by the degree of injury,the ambulances are also graded in accordance with the different configuration of medical equipment.It is expected that the ambulance with the best medical equipment gives priority to the treatment of people with serious injuries and the ambulance with ordinary medical equipment pays the utmost attention to the treatment of people with minor injuries,which may be beneficial to achieve a high efficiency of ambulance usage.The experimental results show that the ambulance routing scheme in light of ambulance grading has better rescue efficiency in the case of large number of injured persons and scarce working ambulances.