The objective of this study is to develop an approach that would assign patients to aeromedical evacuation aircraft and route each aircraft to a single CONUS airport. The goal is to minimize total patient wait time. A heuristic algorithm is developed which exploits the structure of the problem. The first subproblem solved is the assignment of aircraft to airports. This subproblem is solved using integer programming and the results are input into the second subproblem. The second subproblem is the patient to aircraft assignment problem. This subproblem minimizes patient wait time and is solved using network flow programming. The two subproblem are linked into one algorithm and solved iteratively until termination criteria are met. The algorithm is tested on three data sets. The results indicate that the algorithm is an efficient method for scheduling patients and routing aircraft, although optimality is not guaranteed.... Aeromedical evacuation, Integer program, Minimum cost flow, Heuristic algorithm.
Patient Scheduling and Aircraft Routing for Strategic Aeromedical Evacuation
1993
101 pages
Report
No indication
English
Health Care , Operations Research , Aeromedical evacuation , Algorithms , Patients , Routing , Scheduling , Aircraft , Airports , Allocations , Computer programming , Costs , Evacuation , Input , Integer programming , Network flows , Time , Problem solving , Health care facilities , Strategy , Flight paths , Daily occurrence , Theses , Minimum cost flow , Heuristic algorithms
NTIS | 1994