Patient Scheduling and Aircraft Routing for Strategic Aeromedical Evacuation

Abstract

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.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Mar 01, 1993
Accession Number
ADA262577

Entities

People

  • Michael J. Loftus

Organizations

  • Air Force Institute of Technology

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Air Platforms

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Aeromedical Evacuation
  • Air Force
  • Air Transportation
  • Aircrafts
  • Algorithms
  • Burns
  • Computer Programming
  • Data Sets
  • Evacuation
  • Integer Programming
  • Linear Programming
  • Mainframe Computers
  • Medical Evacuation
  • Medical Personnel
  • Operations Research
  • Scheduling (Production)
  • Transport Aircraft

Readers

  • Aerospace logistics and air mobility.
  • Operations Research