Development of a Simulation and Data Visualisation tool to assist in Strategic Operations Management in Emergency Services

The problem of determining where ambulances should be stationed, and at what times they should operate, has received a great deal of attention in the literature. This is a difficult strategic problem whose solution requires careful balancing of political, economic and medical objectives. Quantitative decision processes are becoming increasingly important in providing public accountability for the resourcing decisions that have to be made. We discuss a simulation and analysis software tool ‘BartSim ’ that has been developed by the authors as a strategic decision support tool for use within the St John Ambulance Service (Auckland Region) in New Zealand (St Johns). The novel features incorporated within this study include • the use of a detailed time-varying travel model for modelling travel times in the simulation, • methods for reducing the computational overhead associated with computing timedependent shortest paths in the travel model, and • the development of a geographical information sub-system (GIS) within BartSim that provides spatial data visualisation of both historical data and the results of what-if simulations. 1 Our experience with St Johns, and discussions with emergency operators in Australia and Europe, suggest that emergency services do not have good tools to support their operations management at the strategic level of resourcing decisions. Our experience has shown that a customised system such as BartSim can successfully combine GIS and simulation approaches to provide a quantitative decision support tool highly valued by management. 1