Institute for Systems Research

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Author: search.filters.author.Herrmann, JeffreySubject: search.filters.subject.emergency preparedness

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    Predicting the Impact of Placing Pre-event Pharmaceuticals for Anthrax
    (2011-01) Houck, Michelle; Herrmann, Jeffrey
    Finding feasible strategies to distribute antibiotics quickly to the general public in response to an anthrax attack remains a difficult challenge. Among the proposed strategies is the pre-event placement of pharmaceuticals in individual households for use only as directed by public health authorities. These medications (known as “MedKits”) would allow many exposed persons to begin treatment quickly while reducing the number who visit on points of dispensing, the primary distribution strategy. This paper describes a model that estimates the expected number of deaths in an anthrax attack by modeling the logistics of the response and the use of MedKits. The results show that increasing the number of MedKits distributed can reduce the expected number of deaths. When the population has more potential exposures, deploying MedKits is more effective. The MedKits reduce the number of potential exposures who seek prophylaxis, which allows those truly exposed (but without MedKits) to receive medication sooner, which saves lives. Beyond the scenarios considered here, the ability to predict this benefit in other scenarios will be valuable to public health officials who are considering this option.
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    Solving Continuous Replenishment Inventory Routing Problems with Route Duration Bounds
    (2010-01) Herrmann, Jeffrey; Fomundam, Samuel
    In a public health emergency, resupplying points of dispensing (PODs) with the smallest number of vehicles is an important problem in mass dispensing operations. To solve this problem, this paper describes the Continuous Replenishment Inventory Routing Problem (CRIRP) and presents heuristics for finding feasible solutions when the duration of vehicle routes cannot exceed a given bound. This paper describes a special case of the CRIRP that is equivalent to the bin-packing problem. For the general problem, the paper presents an aggregation approach that combines low-demand sites that are close to one another. We discuss the results of computational tests used to assess the quality and computational effort of the heuristics and the aggregation approach.
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    Solution Techniques for Continuous Replenishment Inventory Routing Problems
    (2009-07) Fomundam, Samuel; Herrmann, Jeffrey
    The Continuous Replenishment Inventory Routing Problem (CRIRP) is a special type of inventory routing problem (IRP) in which vehicle operations occur around the clock. The problem requires determining how many vehicles are needed to resupply the sites, which sites each vehicle should resupply, and the route that each vehicle should take. The objective is to minimize the number of vehicles. This technical report describes a special case of the CRIRP that is equivalent to the bin-packing problem. For the general problem, this report presents necessary and sufficient conditions for feasibility, a lower bound on the number of vehicles needed, and procedures for finding feasible solutions. These include solution construction heuristics and a genetic algorithm. We discuss the results of computational tests used to test the quality and computational effort of the heuristics. These results show that the route-building heuristic performs better than the other heuristics and the genetic algorithm.