The timely delivery of life-saving products such as medicines from the pharmacy to the patient’s location requires availability of an adequate road infrastructure and reliable directions to the patient’s home. However, in many regions of low- and middle-income countries (LMIC), the road infrastructure is in poor state, and medicine delivery is affected by flooded roads, unsafe routes, congestion, traffic disruptions due to accidents, and lack of reliable navigation directions. Owing to the proliferation of smartphones and increasing mobile connectivity, these days the vehicle users rely heavily on routing software apps to select and follow shortest or fastest routes for reaching the destination and deliver life-saving medicinal products. However, routing software apps such as Google and Waze are not able to detect flooded roads or insecure and unsafe roads in various locations in LMIC countries, which causes disruption in drug delivery. Hence, this paper proposes a crowdsourcing-based approach to select optimal drug delivery routes with the objective to prevent drug delivery disruption and to guarantee the required delivery time-widow. The novelty of the proposed approach is that it determines optimal drug delivery routes based on real-time crowdsourced data and using communication services such as SMS. Furthermore, it overcomes the limitation of routing software apps. The tests conducted using the proposed approach show promised results with no drug delivery disruption. In the rainy season, 71% all selected drug delivery routes recommended by proposed system were optimal compared with 89% in the dry season. The similar tests using Google Maps are less successful, where in the rainy season only 11% and in the dry season 49% of the selected routes were found to be optimal.

及时将诸如药品之类的救生产品从药房运送到患者的位置，需要有足够的道路基础设施和可靠的前往患者家的路线。但是，在许多中低收入国家（LMIC）地区，道路基础设施状况不佳，道路水淹，不安全的路线，交通拥堵，由于事故造成的交通中断以及缺乏可靠的导航影响了药品的运送指示。由于智能手机的普及和移动连接性的提高，近来，车辆用户严重依赖路由软件应用程序来选择和遵循最短或最快的路线，以到达目的地并交付可挽救生命的药品。然而，诸如Google和Waze之类的路由软件应用程序无法在LMIC国家中的各个位置检测到洪水泛滥的道路或不安全，不安全的道路，从而导致药物输送中断。因此，本文提出了一种基于众包的方法来选择最佳的药物输送路径，以防止药物输送中断并保证所需的输送时间。所提出的方法的新颖性在于，它基于实时众包数据并使用诸如SMS之类的通信服务来确定最佳的药物输送途径。此外，它克服了路由软件应用程序的限制。使用建议的方法进行的测试显示了预期的结果，没有药物输送中断。在雨季 提议的系统推荐的所有选定药物输送途径中，有71％处于最佳状态，而旱季则为89％。使用Google Maps进行的类似测试不太成功，在雨季中，只有11％的选定路线是最佳选择，而在旱季中，则有49％的路线是最佳选择。