Manpower allocation and vehicle routing problem in non-emergency ambulance transfer service
Zizhen Zhang,
Hu Qin,
Kai Wang,
Huang He and
Tian Liu
Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, 2017, vol. 106, issue C, 45-59
Abstract:
We present a manpower allocation and vehicle routing problem (MAVRP), which is a real-life healthcare problem derived from the non-emergency ambulance transfer service in Hong Kong public hospitals. Both manpower and vehicles are critical resources for the hospitals in their daily operations. The service provider needs to make an effective schedule to dispatch drivers, assistants and ambulances to transport patients scattered in different locations. We formulate the MAVRP into a mathematical programming model and propose several variable neighborhood search (VNS) algorithms to solve it. We tested the VNS with steepest descent, first descent and a mixed of two descent strategies on the MAVRP instances. The computational results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the VNS algorithms. Moreover, we also conducted additional experiments to analyze the impact of the number of vehicles on the solutions of the MAVRP instances.
Keywords: Manpower allocation; Vehicle routing; Healthcare; Variable neighborhood search (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1366554517301722
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:transe:v:106:y:2017:i:c:p:45-59
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/600244/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... 600244/bibliographic
DOI: 10.1016/j.tre.2017.08.002
Access Statistics for this article
Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review is currently edited by W. Talley
More articles in Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu (repec@elsevier.com).