Resilience of multi-hospitals network based on the collaborative scheduling

Abstract

Disasters always cause tremendous injuries and medical resources demands in a short period, while improving resilience of hospital network can help to quickly recover from disruptions. Based on biological cell elasticity theory, this paper assimilates the hospital network to the cellular tissue. And we define an indicator of multi-hospitals network resilience that quantifies the ability of hospital network to react to the medical resources demand disruptions due to natural or human-caused disaster. And a collaborative scheduling model of resources in the network is put forward as the reactive strategy to improve the resilience of the hospitals network against disasters. Finally, numerical examples are given to illustrate the resilience concept and assess the effectiveness of the collaborative scheduling.

Keywords:

• resilience management
• resilience of network
• multi-hospitals network
• collaborative scheduling

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the department editor, the associate editor, and the referees for their many constructive suggestions, which greatly helped to improve this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 71390333], [grant number 71171050]; Jiangsu Province Prospective Joint Research Project [grant number BY2012201].

Notes on contributors

Fei Liu

Fei Liu is a master of engineering from Institute of Systems Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, China. He received bachelor's degree in logistics managements from Southeast University in 2012. His research interests focus on supply chain resilience management.

Lindu Zhao

Lindu Zhao is a professor in School of Economics and Management, Southeast University, Nanjing, China. He received his PhD in systems engineering from Southeast University, China. His current teaching and research interests include supply chain and logistics management, complex systems analysis and decision making, information fusion theory and methods, and emergency system optimization and control. His papers have appeared in Omega: International Journal of Management Science, Transportation Research Part E, Computers & Industrial Engineering, International Journal of Innovative Computing, Information and Control, and other mainstream journals.