Strategic Resilience of Emergency Medical Transport Network Design in Public Health Crises

Recent frequent outbreaks of seasonal infectious diseases have surged emergency medical demand in large cities, causing hospital influxes and exacerbating road congestion. To address this, this study proposes a continuous emergency dedicated lane deployment strategy centered around urban hospitals to segregate rescue and civilian traffic. Adopting a macroscopic perspective, a bilevel programming model (lane reservation problem—complex emergency lane) was developed to minimize the total dedicated lane length and ambulance travel time. The lower-level model integrates lane counts with the Dijkstra algorithm to ascertain the shortest time path. Furthermore, a genetic algorithm with repair strategies (GA-R) was introduced to solve the model effectively. Case studies demonstrate that the GA-R algorithm reduced the average travel time from hospitals to emergency points by approximately 15%, verifying the utility of dedicated lanes in enhancing the efficiency of emergency medical response systems.