Mobile clinics routing in response to covid-19 outbreak: an intelligent hyperheuristic approach

Abstract

In March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced the COIVD-19 as a global pandemic that caused thousands of deaths and brought the world to a standstill with a huge economic burden [1]. Health is an essential factor for sustaining a better life in a better world. Today, for different reasons, several districts in our countries would be deprived from the needed health support and thus, in such cases, we need to deliver health care to those regions. Despite its considerable cost, the mobile clinic remains one of the good solutions to deliver health care to critical areas in our countries. A recognized problem in this domain is minimizing the cost of mobile clinics route in a way that the number of served patients is maximized. This problem is known as the mobile clinics routing problem (MCRP). The purpose of this paper is to present a novel approach that, within the given limited resources, it minimizes the cost and the traveling distance of mobile clinics while maximizing the number of served patients as per priorities assigned according to the patients’ medical status. This paper implements and tests an intelligent variable neighbourhood search algorithm for MCRP.