Abstract: This paper introduces the
vehicle routing problem of the vaccine delivery with vehicle breakdowns. In the
delivery process of vaccines, a continuous low-temperature environment is
required. Once any event that causes the temperature to rise happens during the
whole process, the quality of vaccines cannot be assured, and even human lives
that are injected by the vaccines are threatened. Therefore, this paper
presents a method to evaluate the reliability of vehicle routing schemes in the
vaccine delivery with vehicle breakdown. The method adopts the simulation idea
and supposes breakdowns at every fixed time interval for each vehicle. When a
supposed vehicle breakdown happens, a saving-based heuristic will be applied to
generate a rescue scheme. Finally, the method was coded and run on one of the
classical CVRP instances.Keywords: simulation-based method, reliability of
vehicle routing scheme, vaccine delivery, vehicle breakdown
1 Introduction
Vaccine is a very important
strategic products for a nation. It plays an important role in the protection
of people’s health and the avoidance of health risks. But vaccines are very
particular in their production and delivery process, in which a continuous
low-temperature environment is required. Therefore, a cold chain is often used
to ensure the low-temperature condition for vaccines. The cold chain must not
be interrupted from the initial producion to the final injections for humans.
Once there is any interruption during the whole process, the temperature will
rise, the quality of vaccines cannot be assured, and even human lives that are
injected by the vaccines are threatened. Thus a continous cold chain is very
important for the quality of vaccines.To ensure the low-temperature condition,
the Chinese government has introduced a series of strict regulations to the
production process of vaccines. But surprisingly, the delivery process of
vaccines is not well Supported by the National Natural
Science Foundation of China (70801008, 71271037), the Fundamental Research
Funds for the Central Universities (DUT12JR09) and the Foundation of Liaoning
Educational Committee (L2012019)managed
and controled, which leads to a great risk of quality loss of vaccines. Under
the uncertain delivery environment, there are many possibilities that the
low-temperature conditions for vaccines are interrupted and vaccines have to be
exposed to a high-temperature environment. When any interruption event occurs,
a good delivery scheme can be easily adjusted so that vaccines will not be
exposed to high-temperature environment or will not be exposed too long, while
a bad scheme cannot. Therefore, the reliability of a delivery scheme for
vaccines is very important in coping with the uncertainties of delivery
processes of vaccines. And how to evaluate the reliability of vehicle routing
schemes in vaccine delivery comes to be an important problem which are studied
in this paper. Although there is almost no direct research on the reliability of
vehicle routing schemes in vaccine delivery, some related studies still exist,
which provide us with a good research base. The representative studies include
the following two aspects: the studies on cold chain logistics and disruption
management of vehicle scheduling problem. On the cold chain logistics, Osvald
and Stirn [1]
developed an algorithm for the distribution of fresh vegetables in which the
perishability represents a critical factor; Hsu et al. [2] extended a vehicle routing problem,
with time-windows (VRPTW) by considering the randomness of the perishable food
delivery process and constructing a SVRPTW model to obtain optimal delivery
routes, loads, fleet dispatching and departure times for delivering perishable
food from a distribution center; Chen et al. [3] propose a nonlinear mathematical model to consider
production scheduling and vehicle routing with time windows for perishable food
products in the same framework. Other studies like references [4-9] also
concern the model and algorithm of the cold chain logistics. On the disruption
management of vehicle scheduling problem, Lorini et al. [10] extended a previously developed
problem-solving approach for a vehicle routing problem with dynamic requests
and dynamic travel times to account for more sophisticated communication means
between the drivers and the central dispatch office; Li et al. [11] introduced and studied real-time
vehicle rerouting problems with time windows, applicable to delivery and/or
pickup services that undergo service disruptions due to vehicle breakdowns; Mu et al. [12] focused on disruption management of
the vehicle routing problem, in which a vehicle breaks down during the delivery
and a new routing solution needs to be quickly generated to minimise the costs,
and developed two tabu search algorithms to solve the problem. Other studies
like references [13-19] also concern the model and algorithm of the disruption
management of vehicle scheduling problem. As a result of the possibilities of
vehicle breakdowns in the vaccine delivery, this paper focuses on evaluating
the reliability of vehicle routing schemes in vaccine delivery when vehicle
break down during their delivery process. This is a challenging problem that
has never been studied before. To evaluate the reliability of a vehicle routing
scheme, a simulation-based method is presented in this paper. The remainder of
this paper is arranged as follows. First, the problem studied in the paper is
described in the next section. And the framework of the evaluation method is presented
in the Section 3. An experiment is reported in Section 4, and the paper
finishes with the conclusions.
4 Conclusions
This paper focuses on the problem of evaluating the
reliability of vehicle routing schemes in the vaccine delivery with vehicle
breakdown and presents a simulation-based method for it. The method, which does
not require complex fine-tuning processes, combines the classical Clarke and
Wright heuristic with Monte Carlo simulation and provides a relatively simple
and yet flexible solution procedure for evaluating the reliability of vehicle routing
schemes. According to the objective of the problem, the presented method
changes the saving definition of the classical Clarke-Wright algorithm and
makes it fit for the problem which requires large amount of computation. The
method is applied to classical Capacitated Vehicle Routing instances and the
computation result demonstrates its validity.
https://codeshoppy.com/shop/product/ehealth-care/
https://codeshoppy.com/shop/product/pg-locator-for-searching-pg-hostel-or-rental-houses/
https://codeshoppy.com/shop/product/child-safety-app/
https://codeshoppy.com/shop/product/libarary-management-system/
https://codeshoppy.com/shop/product/leakage-detection-and-risk-assessment-on-privacy-for-android-applications-lrpandroid/
https://codeshoppy.com/shop/product/ediagnostic-lab-online-reporting-mobile-app/
https://codeshoppy.com/shop/product/anomaly-detection/
https://codeshoppy.com/shop/product/pg-locator-for-searching-pg-hostel-or-rental-houses/
https://codeshoppy.com/shop/product/child-safety-app/
https://codeshoppy.com/shop/product/libarary-management-system/
https://codeshoppy.com/shop/product/leakage-detection-and-risk-assessment-on-privacy-for-android-applications-lrpandroid/
https://codeshoppy.com/shop/product/ediagnostic-lab-online-reporting-mobile-app/
https://codeshoppy.com/shop/product/anomaly-detection/
Comments
Post a Comment