Combining spatial information and optimization for locating emergency medical service stations: A case study for Lower Austria

Emergency medical services have been established in many countries all over the world. Good rst care improves the outcome of patients in terms of duration of the stay in hospital, ability of recovering completely of the disease and in terms of cost for the treatment. In this paper, we present an integrated approach combining spatial information and integer optimization for emergency medical service location planning. The research is motivated by the recent call for bids to restructure the location of emergency medical services in the Austrian federal state Lower Austria by the local state government. Our solution framework is driven by the constraints given in the call. Our framework also allows for constraints on the places where an emergency physician is hosted, accounting for the fact that { for economical reasons { it might not be feasible to place emergency physicians at arbitrary places. In our study, we show that our solutions provide better coverage of residents with fewer emergency physicians than the current status quo.