Journal
ANNALS OF OPERATIONS RESEARCH
Volume 236, Issue 1, Pages 177-196Publisher
SPRINGER
DOI: 10.1007/s10479-014-1716-1
Keywords
Deterioration; Disaster; Emergency relief; Queueing network; Health care
Categories
Funding
- Chinese Ministry of Education [11YJC630228]
- Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong [S2011040002092]
- United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) through the National Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events (CREATE) [2010-ST-061-RE0001]
- United States National Science Foundation [1200899, 1334930]
- Directorate For Engineering
- Div Of Civil, Mechanical, & Manufact Inn [1334930] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Large-scale disasters typically result in a shortage of essential medical resources, and thus it is critical to optimize resource allocation to improve the quality of the relief operations. One important factor that has been largely neglected when optimizing the available medical resources is the deterioration of victims' health condition in the aftermath of a disaster; e.g., a victim's health condition could deteriorate from mild to severe if not treated promptly. In this paper, we first present a novel queueing network to model this deterioration in health conditions. Second, we provide both analytical solutions and numerical illustrations for this queueing network. Finally, we formulate two resource allocation models in order to minimize the total expected death rate and total waiting time, respectively. Numerical examples are provided to illustrate the properties of optimal policies.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available