Wounded Transportation and Assignment to Hospital During Crisis

Abstract

Disasters have catastrophic effects on human lives that require a speedy evacuation reaction in order to minimize their severe consequences. In a crisis management supply chain, the main objective of our study is to minimize the total transporting time of wounded in order to minimize the human loss. Evacuation is a tool to save human lives, but it is not always a practicable decision to protect the lives of residents. Therefore, a prompt disaster response, i.e., emergency evacuation planning, involves the planning of the required resources assignment and timely vehicle scheduling, which are compulsory to organize successful secured operations that could, if well organized, save many injured humans and lessen the human suffering.

To achieve this goal, we treat the Integrated Problem of Ambulance Scheduling and Resources Assignment (IPASRA) in the case of a sudden disaster. The required resources are the ambulances and the hospitals. However, the hospitals’ serving capacities might be considered or not according to the extent of disaster and particularly to the wounded bodies’ total number. We formulate the (IPASRA) as a linear model; furthermore, a novel hybrid algorithm based on Tabu Search (TS) and Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure (GRASP) is offered to tackle this complex problem.