Citation

Shi Y, He Z. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2018; 15(8): e15081651.

Affiliation

School of Transportation and Logistics, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu 610031, China. hezhenggang@swjtu.edu.cn.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2018, MDPI: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute)

DOI

10.3390/ijerph15081651

PMID

30081507

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.

Language: en

Keywords

cold-chain distribution; disturbance management; hybrid genetic algorithm; medical supplies transportation; natural disasters