An improvement of scheduling method for medical resource order and distribution

In our previous work, we studied the scheduling of medical resource order and distribution based on an influenza diffusion model. The problem was formulated as a 0–1 mixed integer programming model. However, an important decision parameter, the order size, was set to be a constant number in that paper. This is not suitable in most actual operations, which motivates us to improve it. The main contribution of this paper is that the fixed order size in our previous paper is changed as a decision variable in the new optimization model. In addition, we conduct a comprehensive comparison of these two different models. The test results show the good performance of the new model.