Computer Science Colloquium

Wednesday, February 24, 2021, 4:15-5pm

Operational Planning for Mobile Medical Units

 

Abstract

Mobile medical units allow for an efficient medical coverage of sparsely populated, spacious areas. Unfortunately, flexibility comes at the price of a highly complex operation planning process. We developed a multi-staged optimization approach for the operation of mobile medical units combining facility location, scheduling and routing problems.

To determine our vehicle routes, we have to solve a budgeted matching problem on an edge colored graph, which we refer to as budgeted colored matching problem (BCM). We show the strong NP-hardness of the BCM on bipartite graphs with uniform edge weights, costs and budgets using a reduction from (3,B2)-SAT. On special graph classes, the BCM is solvable in pseudo-polynomial time.

Finally, we evaluate the usage of mobile medical units in our model region situated in the northern Eifel. To assess the quality of solutions, we developed an agent-based simulation, which models the interaction between patients and general practitioners.

 

The computer science lecturers invite interested people to join.