EMS response actions in mass casualty incidents

A mass casualty incident (MCI) is a single incident which triggers a large number of emergency medical demands requiring different treatment based on the severity of injury. The time of treatment is an important indicator to measure the service quality of emergency medical care. However, limited by the number of ambulances and capacity of hospitals, an MCI disturbs the proper functioning of the usual pre-hospital health care system, and the zone where the MCI occurred usually is challenged by traffic congestion when a great number of demands occurred in a concentrated short period of time. This study aims to propose a traffic flow problem considering congestion of routes and hospitals. In our work, we develop a mixed integer quadratic programming, where the objective function is quadratic. The proposed method is aimed to improve the survival of victims in an MCI. ? 2017 American Society of Civil Engineers.