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Abstract
Demand for emergency resources is usually uncertain and varies quickly in anti-bioterrorism system. Besides, emergency resources which had been allocated to the epidemic areas in the early rescue cycle will affect the demand later. In this article, an integrated and dynamic optimisation model with time-varying demand based on the epidemic diffusion rule is constructed. The heuristic algorithm coupled with the MATLAB mathematical programming solver is adopted to solve the optimisation model. In what follows, the application of the optimisation model as well as a short sensitivity analysis of the key parameters in the time-varying demand forecast model is presented. The results show that both the model and the solution algorithm are useful in practice, and both objectives of inventory level and emergency rescue cost can be controlled effectively. Thus, it can provide some guidelines for decision makers when coping with emergency rescue problem with uncertain demand, and offers an excellent reference when issues pertain to bioterrorism.
Acknowledgements
This study has been partially supported by the project, entitled ‘The Operations and Simulation of Emergency Response Logistics Network in Anti-bioterrorism Systems’ of the Natural Science Foundation of China (70671021) and by the Scientific Research Foundation of Graduate School of Southeast University (YBJJ0910). The authors thank these anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments that have helped to improve the quality of the article.