Abstract
The transport of non-urgent patients is part of the daily life of the Portuguese firefighters. This type of organization seeks to optimize the allocation of resources to reduce its economic expenses and maximize the availability of resources. In this work, the needs of a fire station, that intends to minimize the route taken by ambulances transporting non-urgent patients, is addressed. This problem can be seen as a Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows in which each vehicle leaves the fire station, travels to the residence of non-urgent patients and, after reaching its maximum capacity in terms of maximum number of passengers or maximum time, transports them to the clinic where treatments are carried out. Also, this work intents to summarized the previous work on transport of non-urgent patients in Portugal. A Vehicle Routing Problem open source tool designed for healthcare and tourism sectors is used to test real instances extract from data provided by a Portuguese fire station. The results show that the solver may be used as a tool for assisting organizations that perform non-urgent transport. However, it is necessary to add constraints concerning time windows for the patients reaching at the treatment facilities, to minimize the delays.
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Notes
- 1.
Due to confidentiality issues the names of the patients are not shown, and the latitude and longitude of the addresses are blurred.
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Acknowledgements
This work has been partially supported by national funds through FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia through project UIDP/04728/2020. We would like to thank G. Erdoğan for his availability to help us with the solver. It was a precious.
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Lopes, E., Costa e Silva, E. (2021). Evaluation of an Open Source Solver to Assist on the Non-urgent Patients Transport Problem. In: Abraham, A., Hanne, T., Castillo, O., Gandhi, N., Nogueira Rios, T., Hong, TP. (eds) Hybrid Intelligent Systems. HIS 2020. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1375. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73050-5_38
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