Personnel scheduling and supplies provisioning in emergency relief operations

The practice of emergency operations often involves the travelling of medical teams and the distribution of medical supplies. In an emergency, such as an earthquake, a medical team often has to visit various hospitals (the customers) one after another in a predetermined sequence in order to perform on-site operations that require certain amounts of medical supplies. Because of their perishable nature, the medical supplies are typically shipped in batches from upstream suppliers and kept at multiple distribution centers during the disaster relief process. The scheduling of the medical teams and the provisioning of the medical supplies give rise to a scheduling problem that involves the timely dispatching of supplies from distribution centers to hospitals in coordination with the scheduling of medical teams so as to minimize the total tardiness of the completions of the operations to be performed. We introduce a mathematical programming based rolling horizon heuristic that is able to find near optimal solutions for networks of up to 80 hospitals very fast. We also report on empirical observations with regard to the computational performance of the heuristic; we consider 5420 randomly generated test cases as well as a case that is based on an actual hospital-distribution center network in the greater New York metropolitan area. Managerial insights are drawn from numerical studies regarding the benefits of pre-positioning medical supplies at the distribution centers.