Authors:
Arash Rafiey
1
;
Vladyslav Sokol
2
;
Ramesh Krishnamurti
2
;
Snezana Mitrovic Minic
2
;
Abraham Punnen
2
and
Krishna Teja Malladi
2
Affiliations:
1
Simon Fraser University and Indiana State University, Canada
;
2
Simon Fraser University, Canada
Keyword(s):
Healthcare, Vehicle Routing, Time Windows, Pickup And Delivery, Taxi, Network Flow, Discretization, Arc Reduction.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Applications
;
e-Business
;
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Logistics
;
Operational Research
;
OR in Health
;
OR in Transportation
;
Pattern Recognition
;
Scheduling
;
Software Engineering
Abstract:
We consider the problem of routing samples taken from patients to laboratories for testing. These samples are taken from patients housed in hospitals, and are sent to laboratories in other hospitals for testing. The hospitals are distributed in a geographical area, such as a city. Each sample has a deadline, and all samples have to be transported within their deadlines. We have a fixed number of vehicles as well as an unlimited number of taxis available to transport the samples. The objective is to minimize a linear function of the total distance travelled by the vehicles and the taxis. We provide a mathematical programming formulation for the problem using the multi-commodity network flow model, and solve the formulation using CPLEX, a general-purpose MIP solver. We also provide a computational study to evaluate the solution procedure.