Study on the strategy of multimodal transportation of medical aid materials for public health emergencies: a case study basing on COVID-19

The emergency response to sudden public health incident often encounters problems such as the long distance between the medical material supply node and the demand point or the destruction of key roads, which makes it difficult to transport materials directly to the disaster area by vehicles in time. Helicopters are increasingly being used to transport critical medical emergency resources, but it is not easy to distribute medical supplies through helicopter in large-scale public health incidents. In order to solve the above problems, a two-stage combined transportation method for medical supplies based on clustering is proposed in this paper. In the first stage, the quantum bacterial foraging (QBF) algorithm is used to select emergency transit points and divide the medical assistance points. In view of the imbalance of remaining capacity in QBF division, an improved division method (quantum bacterial foraging with capacity constraints (QBFwCC)) is proposed and a ‘helicopter–vehicle’ medical material combined transportation network structure is constructed in consideration of capacity constraints. In the second stage, a transportation route optimization model based on clustering is established to determine the specific transportation route from the emergency transit point to the medical assistance point. The performance of the method proposed in the paper was analyzed through experimental COVID-19 simulation and compared between QBF and QBFwCC. The results show that the method not only achieves the goal of optimization, but also effectively reduces the number of vehicles.