Mathematical Programming Guides Air-Ambulance Routing at Ornge. Carnes, T. A., Henderson, S. G., Shmoys, D. B., Ahghari, M., & MacDonald, R. D. Interfaces, 43:232–239, 2013.
Mathematical Programming Guides Air-Ambulance Routing at Ornge [pdf]Paper  abstract   bibtex   6 downloads  
Ornge provides air-ambulance services to the Province of Ontario. A major portion of their service involves pre-scheduled transports from one medical facility to another. These transports almost exclusively require fixed-wing aircraft due to the distances involved and cost considerations. The requests are received in advance, scheduled overnight, and typically executed the following day. We describe our work in developing a planning tool which determines an assignment of requests to aircraft that minimizes cost, subject to a range of complicating constraints. The tool is in use by flight planners every day at Ornge, and has resulted in substantial savings relative to the previous manual approach to devising schedules. We describe the problem, our formulation, its implementation, and the impact on operations at Ornge.

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