Decision Analysis of Disturbance Management in the Process of Medical Supplies Transportation after Natural Disasters

Yuhe Shi and Zhenggang He
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Yuhe Shi: School of Transportation and Logistics, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu 610031, China
Zhenggang He: School of Transportation and Logistics, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu 610031, China

IJERPH, 2018, vol. 15, issue 8, 1-18

Abstract: Public health emergencies, such as casualties and epidemic spread caused by natural disasters, have become important factors that seriously affect social development. Special medical supplies, such as blood and vaccines, are important public health medical resources, and the cold-chain distribution of medical supplies is in a highly unstable environment after a natural disaster that is easily affected by disturbance events. This paper innovatively studies the distribution optimization of medical supplies after natural disasters from the perspective of disturbance management. A disturbance management model for medical supplies distribution is established from two dimensions: time and cost. In addition, a hybrid genetic algorithm is introduced to solve the model. Disturbance recovery schemes with different weight coefficients are obtained through the actual numerical experiments, and experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed model and algorithm. Finally, we discuss the formulation of weight coefficients in the case of emergency distribution and general distribution, which provide a reference for emergency decisions in disturbance events.

Keywords: natural disasters; medical supplies transportation; cold-chain distribution; disturbance management; hybrid genetic algorithm (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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