A comparison of ambulance location models in two Mexican cases

The development of several ambulance location models have been discussed in the academic literature. Most of these models have been further extended to consider more realistic situations into account and the use of different assessment criteria. However, there is not an exhaustive literature that takes the existing standard models to compare them according to the criteria used in practice. In this work, we undertake the task of comparing the performance of several ambulance location models on coverage and response time criteria. The results of this work are important to help emergency medical organizations to define their most adequate model for defining their ambulance base structure. The comparison of the models is carried out in two Mexican emergency operations of the Red Cross located in the cities of Monterrey and Tijuana.