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Title:

A Generic Heuristic for Maximizing Inventory Slack in Emergency Medication Distribution Problem

Accession Number:

01519382

Record Type:

Component

Availability:

Transportation Research Board Business Office

500 Fifth Street, NW
Washington, DC 20001 United States

Abstract:

In the event of an unnoticed man-made or natural disaster, city and metropolitan areas are required to deliver prophylactic medications or emergency relief supplies to their entire residents within a restricted time window via previously selected points of dispensing (PODs). Inventory of such supplements at PODs should not reach the negative stock at any times. Medical inventory management; thus, can be formulated as Inventory Slack Routing Problems (ISRPs), which are known to be NP-Hard. Solution algorithm developed herein is based on three phases: routing and scheduling of supply vehicles to PODs and defining delivery quantities to each POD. Heuristic approaches are proposed for the first two phases, results of which are employed in the third phase to obtain the exact delivery quantities. The proposed algorithms are later tested on county public health departments in the state of Maryland facing emergency situation that requires dispense of one type of prophylactic medicine to its entire population. The proposed approach outperforms the existing methods in terms of the delivery slack as well as its generic applicability in different conditions (geographical location of the depot and PODs, resource availability…). Modifications and detailed comparison with earlier methodologies are provided and followed by sensitivity analyses guiding decision makers towards an efficient and essential investment in public health section.

Supplemental Notes:

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AT015(2) Paper reviews - Modeling. Alternate title: Generic Heuristic for Maximizing Inventory Slack in Emergency Medication Distribution Problem.

Monograph Accession #:

01503729

Report/Paper Numbers:

14-5293

Language:

English

Corporate Authors:

Transportation Research Board

500 Fifth Street, NW
Washington, DC 20001 United States

Authors:

Mollanejad, Mostafa
Faturechi, Reza
TariVerdi, Mersedeh
Kim, Myungseob (Edward)

Pagination:

15p

Publication Date:

2014

Conference:

Transportation Research Board 93rd Annual Meeting

Location: Washington DC
Date: 2014-1-12 to 2014-1-16
Sponsors: Transportation Research Board

Media Type:

Digital/other

Features:

Figures; References; Tables

Geographic Terms:

Maryland

Subject Areas:

Highways; Planning and Forecasting; Security and Emergencies; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning

Source Data:

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2014 Paper #14-5293

Files:

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Created Date:

Jan 27 2014 3:51PM