As a useful descriptive tool for emergency service effectiveness, the hypercube queuing model has been applied in systems of many countries, such as the SAMU system in Brazil. However, the traditional hypercube queuing model and its extended forms assume that the service provider performs independent services, lacking a compelling description of the situation where emergency vehicles perform cooperative services (e.g., NEPPHE in China). To this end, we assume that vehicles in the same fleet simultaneously start and end services and propose a cooperative hypercube queuing (CHQ) model that can describe the state of emergency systems which apply multivehicle dispatches. In order to verify the accuracy of the model, we apply Arena simulation software in Wuhan case. The results show that the CHQ model can illustrate cooperative performance effectively. Sensitivity analyses under more general parameters are conducted to reveal insights into the model application.
A tutorial on hypercube queueing models and some practical applications in Emergency Service Systems