Response Areas for Two Emergency Units

This paper gives a model in which two urban emergency service units (such as fire engines or ambulances) cooperate in responding to alarms or calls from the public in a specified region of a city. Given the home locations of the units and the spatial distribution of alarm rates, it is possible to specify which unit should respond to each alarm by defining a response area for each unit. The average response time to alarms and the workload of each unit are calculated as functions of the boundary that separates their response areas. The boundaries that minimize average response time and the ones that equalize workload are determined. Some boundaries can be dominated, in the sense that another boundary improves both workload balance and response time. The set of undominated boundaries is found.