An Overview of a Break Assignment Problem Considering Area Coverage

TL;DR

This paper introduces the Break Assignment Problem Considering Area Coverage (BAPCAC), a mathematical model for optimizing emergency fleet break scheduling by balancing area coverage and crew fatigue, based on incident data.

Contribution

It formulates a novel mathematical model for BAPCAC that integrates area coverage, fleet sizing, and break scheduling for emergency vehicles.

Findings

Model can determine fleet size and break strategies.

Supports location planning for idle vehicles.

Addresses crew fatigue and coverage simultaneously.

Abstract

Prolonged focused work periods decrease efficiency with related decline of attention and performance. Therefore, emergency fleet break scheduling should consider both area coverage by idle vehicles (related to the fleet's target arrival time to incidents) and vehicle crews' service requirements for breaks to avoid fatigue. In this paper, we propose a break assignment problem considering area coverage (BAPCAC) addressing this issue. Moreover, we formulate a mathematical model for the BAPCAC problem. Based on available historical spatio-temporal incident data and service requirements, the BAPCAC model can be used not only to dimension the size of the fleet at the tactical level, but also to decide upon the strategies related with break scheduling. Moreover, the model could be used to compute (suboptimal) locations for idle vehicles in each time period and arrange vehicles' crews' work breaks considering given break and coverage constraints.