  Prolonged focused work periods decrease efficiency with related decline of
attention and performance. Therefore, emergency fleet break scheduling should
consider both area coverage by idle vehicles (related to the fleet's target
arrival time to incidents) and vehicle crews' service requirements for breaks
to avoid fatigue. In this paper, we propose a break assignment problem
considering area coverage (BAPCAC) addressing this issue. Moreover, we
formulate a mathematical model for the BAPCAC problem. Based on available
historical spatio-temporal incident data and service requirements, the BAPCAC
model can be used not only to dimension the size of the fleet at the tactical
level, but also to decide upon the strategies related with break scheduling.
Moreover, the model could be used to compute (suboptimal) locations for idle
vehicles in each time period and arrange vehicles' crews' work breaks
considering given break and coverage constraints.
