Journal of Heuristics最新文献

英文中文

Vehicle routing for the urgent delivery of face shields during the COVID-19 pandemic. 新冠肺炎大流行期间紧急运送面罩的车辆路线

IF 1.1 4区计算机科学 Q4 COMPUTER SCIENCE, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Journal of Heuristics

Pub Date : 2020-01-01 Epub Date: 2020-08-18 DOI: 10.1007/s10732-020-09456-8

Joaquín Pacheco, Manuel Laguna

The speed by which the COVID-19 pandemic spread throughout the world caught some national and local governments unprepared. Healthcare systems found themselves struggling to increase capacity and procure key supplies, such as personal protective equipment. Protective face shields became essential for healthcare professionals. However, most hospitals and healthcare facilities did not have them in adequate quantities. The urgency of producing and delivering face shields increased as the number of COVID-19 cases rapidly multiplied. This was the situation that we encountered in the city and province of Burgos (Spain). Since there was no time to wait for a large manufacturer to produce face shields, private citizens and small companies volunteered to make them using technologies such as 3D printers. Nonprofits, citizens, and governments agencies volunteered to deliver materials to the face shield makers and to pick up and deliver the face shields to health centers and other locations where they were needed. This resulted in a vehicle routing problem with some special characteristics that made it different from models used for commercial purposes. We describe the development of a heuristic to find feasible and efficient routes for this problem. We highlight the advantages of using heuristics in an emergency context like the one triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, the heuristic approach allowed us to design, implement, test, and delivery a routing system in less than 1 week from the time that the local government contacted us with what they described as a logistics nightmare.

COVID-19大流行在全球蔓延的速度让一些国家和地方政府措手不及。卫生保健系统发现自己在努力提高能力和采购个人防护装备等关键物资。防护面罩对医疗保健专业人员来说是必不可少的。但是，大多数医院和保健设施没有足够的数量。随着COVID-19病例数量迅速增加，生产和交付面罩的紧迫性也在增加。这就是我们在布尔戈斯市和省（西班牙）遇到的情况。由于没有时间等待大型制造商生产面罩，私人公民和小公司自愿使用3D打印机等技术制造面罩。非营利组织、公民和政府机构自愿向口罩制造商提供材料，并将口罩捡起来送到医疗中心和其他需要口罩的地方。这导致车辆路线问题具有一些特殊的特征，使其不同于用于商业目的的模型。我们描述了一个启发式的发展，以找到可行的和有效的路线，为这个问题。我们强调在COVID-19大流行引发的紧急情况下使用启发式方法的优势。特别是，启发式方法使我们能够在不到一周的时间内设计、实施、测试和交付一个路由系统，从当地政府联系我们到他们所说的物流噩梦。

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