Location—Allocation Modeling for Emergency Evacuations in the Aegean Sea

Insular regions play an important role in Eastern Mediterranean, mostly attributed to their geographical, environmental, social and economic peculiarities. Greek islands in the Aegean Sea are such an example, being attractive tourism destinations with a varying permanent population both island- and season-specific. Such a seasonality of islands’ population, coupled with problems related to their geographical fragmentation, challenges local decision-making regarding, among others, health service provision. This chapter analyzes the spatial distribution of national aero-evacuation means, such as helicopters, in order to inform the debate about de-centralized services of emergency evacuations in island complexes of the Aegean Sea. After discussing potential use of Geographical Datasets for smart decision-making regarding emergency evacuation procedures, the focus of the paper is on a location-allocation model of helicopter bases in the islands of the Aegean Sea. The results of this work aim at shedding some light on the spatial optimization of the helicopter bases in the area; and discussing the trade-off conditions of emergency evacuation services in such a fragmented geographical space. Finally, after utilizing a number of large scale geographical simulations for allocating aero-evacuation bases, the usefulness of spatial analytics for taking more informed decisions is illustrated, especially in areas where dynamic seasonality of population throughout the year challenges health service provision.