Abstract:We present a manpower allocation and vehicle routing problem (MAVRP), which is a real-life healthcare problem derived from the non-emergency ambulance transfer service in Hong Kong public hospitals. Both manpower and vehicles are critical resources for the hospitals in their daily operations. The service provider needs to make an effective schedule to dispatch drivers, assistants and ambulances to transport patients scattered in different locations. We formulate the MAVRP into a mathematical programming model and propose several variable neighborhood search (VNS) algorithms to solve it. We tested the VNS with steepest descent, first descent and a mixed of two descent strategies on the MAVRP instances. The computational results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the VNS algorithms. Moreover, we also conducted additional experiments to analyze the impact of the number of vehicles on the solutions of the MAVRP instances.

　　Keywords:Manpower allocation; Vehicle routing; Healthcare; Variable neighborhood search

　　非急救医疗转运服务因转运资源有限且病人分散等特点，已成为医疗服务管理领域近年来的研究热点问题。本文针对非急救医疗转运中的医护人员分配和救护车路径优化问题进行了研究，提出了能够在短时间内求出高精度近似解的变邻域搜索算法。本文于2017年10月发表在Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, 106, 45-59，王恺为通讯作者。该期刊为JCR数据库中Economics, Operations Research & Management Science, Transportation等学科的一区期刊，5年影响因子为3.791。