ABSTRACT

This paper aims to emphasize the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic at the healthcare logistics and supply chain networks and to transport polymerase chain reaction testing samples between hospitals and laboratories by using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). To achieve the mission, range and payload capacitated UAV routing problem is defined and a mixed-integer linear programming model (MILP) is developed. The MILP model aims to decide the requisite quantity of the UAVs and to minimize the total transportation distance while satisfying the predetermined constraints. As a real-life instance, the healthcare network of Istanbul is selected and the network includes 219 hospitals and 23-unit basic testing laboratories for the COVID-19 pandemic. The results indicated that the proposed optimization model can find the needed number of UAVs with the minimum tour distances in reasonable run times and achieves to transport 25,000 testing specimens between hospitals and laboratories via UAVs.

摘要

本文旨在强调 COVID-19 大流行对医疗物流和供应链网络的影响，并通过使用无人机 (UAV) 在医院和实验室之间运输聚合酶链反应测试样本。为了完成任务，定义了距离和有效载荷有能力的无人机路由问题，并开发了混合整数线性规划模型 (MILP)。MILP 模型旨在确定所需的无人机数量，并在满足预定约束的同时最小化总运输距离。作为现实生活中的例子，选择了伊斯坦布尔的医疗保健网络，该网络包括 219 家医院和 23 个单位的 COVID-19 大流行基本检测实验室。