International Journal of Engineering and Technology

The use of ambulance location model is significant in determining the best ambulance locations to ensure efficient emergency medical services (EMS) delivery. Maximal Covering Location Problem (MCLP) is one of the most common location models. It is an NP-hard problem and the objective is to maximize the coverage by a fixed number of ambulances. In this study, the demand zones are distributed in a grid based hypothetical region and each zone can host at most one ambulance only. The effectiveness of using Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm in finding the best solution for MCLP problem is investigated. The result is compared with the random search technique. It was found that the proposed method manages to identify global optimal solution at a reasonable search time.