How to optimize the supply and allocation of medical emergency resources during public health emergencies

Abstract

The solutions to the supply and allocation of medical emergency resources during public health emergencies greatly affect the efficiency of epidemic prevention and control. Currently, the main problem in computational epidemiology is how the allocation scheme should be adjusted in accordance with epidemic trends to satisfy the needs of population coverage, epidemic propagation prevention, and the social allocation balance. More specifically, the metropolitan demand for medical emergency resources varies depending on different local epidemic situations. It is therefore difficult to satisfy all objectives at the same time in real applications. In this paper, a data-driven multi-objective optimization method, called as GA-PSO, is proposed to address such problem. It adopts the one-way crossover and mutation operations to modify the particle updating framework in order to escape the local optimum. Taking the megacity Shenzhen in China as an example, experiments show that GA-PSO effectively balances different objectives and generates a feasible allocation strategy. Such a strategy does not only support the decision-making process of the Shenzhen center in terms of disease control and prevention, but it also enables us to control the potential propagation of COVID-19 and other epidemics.