The Brazilian emergency medical system SAMU (Sistema de Atendimento Móvel de Urgência) is an emergency medical system of public government liability, in which the users' service demand in an urban region is usually separated into subregions and classes of emergency calls. This demand can change substantially during the day, geographically and temporally, due to its random nature and also to the different behavior patterns of the population throughout the day. For instance, typically there is less demand during the night hours than during the day. The goals of this study are to verify whether the hypercube queuing model is adequate to analyze performance measures of SAMU, such as mean response times to the users, and use this model to analyze multiple alternatives of ambulance location considering significant variations in the demand and service throughout the day. In order to verify the feasibility and applicability of this approach, a case study was conducted in the SAMU of Ribeirão Preto-SP.
Hypercube queuing model; SAMU; Ambulance location; Emergency medical system
