Cross-Border Ambulance PlacementÂ
PhD candidate: Hossein Torkinezhadirani
Emergency Medical Services (EMS) face increasing pressure as emergency demand rises while resources remain limited, a challenge that is particularly acute in border regions. In these areas, ambulances from neighboring countries can sometimes reach patients more quickly but are rarely used due to legal, organizational, and operational barriers.
This PhD project, conducted within CARE-FLOW Work Package 5, addresses this issue by developing data-driven decision-support methods for cross-border ambulance placement, allocation, and dynamic repositioning in the German–Dutch border region. EMS systems in this region differ substantially in dispatch protocols, response standards, fleet composition, and labor regulations. The research integrates operations research, optimization, and simulation to design advanced location–allocation models that explicitly account for heterogeneous ambulance types, urgency-dependent response requirements, and probabilistic vehicle availability, and to extend these models to support dynamic ambulance repositioning in response to evolving demand and coverage gaps. Country-specific rules and cross-border eligibility constraints are embedded within a unified analytical framework. These models are evaluated using discrete-event simulation based on real operational data, enabling realistic assessment under dynamic demand, congestion, and parallel emergency calls. In addition to improving average response times, the project incorporates equity-aware objectives to protect the least served areas. By quantifying the trade-offs among efficiency, fairness, and cooperation, the project seeks to deliver both scientific advances in EMS planning and actionable, evidence-based insights for designing resilient, fair cross-border emergency care systems.
