A new perspective for scheduling the medical resource order and distribution

In our previous works (Liu & Su, 2016a [1], 2016b [2]), we had studied the scheduling of medical resource order and distribution based on an influenza diffusion model. In paper [1], the order size in distribution centers (DCs) was set to be a constant number, and it was improved to be a decision variable in paper [2]. A core decision variable, the number of beds assigned for epidemic patients in each designated hospital at each day, is decided by solving the optimization model in both of these works. This is not suitable for most actual operations because the arrival of patients is totally stochastic. Therefore, this paper provides a new perspective for scheduling the medical resource order and distribution, which considers the arrival of patients in each designated hospital at each day as a stochastic variable. In what follows, we conduct a comprehensive comparison of the new method and the original model in paper [1]. The test results show that the good performance of the new method.