A Multi-Objective Optimization Method for Emergency Medical Resources Allocation

Emergency medical service that is crucial for the lives of patients is one of the most critical parts of health care industry. Therefore, how to allocate resources of first-aid stations for emergency patients is an important work of emergency management. Both the distances between first-aid stations and patients and available resources need to be considered in an emergency medical resources allocation. As such, emergency medical resources allocation is a multi-objective optimization problem for optimization scheduling of resources. To solve this problem, this paper presents a mathematical optimization model and an improved multi-objective algorithm based on artificial bee colony algorithm. The algorithm is improved mainly in two aspects. Firstly, since the traditional bee colony algorithm is only to optimize single objective function, the improved algorithm adopts a new solution structure and search methods for the optimization of discrete values. Secondly, the dominated number of a solution is computed to decide if the solution is to be abandoned. Experiments show that our method achieves better results in comparison with traditional multi-objective optimization algorithms, and better time performance in practice.