User-fair designing emergency service systems

Abstract

The usual approach to emergency system design consists in deploying a given number of service centers to minimize the disutility perceived by an average user, what is called “min-sum” or “system approach”. As a user in emergency tries to obtain service from the nearest service center, the min-sum optimal deployment may cause such partitioning of the users’ set into clusters serviced by one center that population of users is unequally distributed among centers. Within this paper, we focus on user-fair design of emergency service systems, where the fair approach is not applied on the individual users, but on the clusters serviced by one center. The fairer deployment should prevent the users to some extent from frequent occurrence of the situation, when the nearest service center to a current demand location is occupied by servicing some previously raised demand. In such case, the current demand must be assigned to a more distant center. To achieve fairer design of emergency system, we present four approaches to the design problem together with their implementation and comparison using numerical experiments performed with several real-sized benchmarks.

Keywords

• fair design
• emergency service system
• location problem
• approximate approach
• decomposition heuristic technique