MILP models of a patient transportation problem

Abstract

AbstractWith ageing societies and increasing number of patients, there is a growing need for quality services that help transporting non-urgent patients to hospitals. In logistics, patient transportation problems are usually modeled as a dial-a-ride problem. In a Dial-a-Ride problem, a fleet of vehicles is providing the delivery services between the loading points and the delivery destinations. The demands are known in advance. In most cases the total travel distance of the vehicles is to be minimized. In this paper, we consider a specific dial-a-ride problem, where a single vehicle is used to transport patients to the same hospital. In determining the optimal route, the multiple and different travel needs of patients, such as their maximum travel time, are also taken into consideration. We introduce 4 different mixed integer linear programming models of the routing problem. Finally, the efficiency of the four models was compared using some real-life problems by solving them with a commercial solver.