Project description

Accessibility of health services, particularly for underserved communities, is challenged by lack of transportation options. Those without cars must often rely on delivery of health services to their area, which may be limited by scheduling and routing mobile health unit challenges. In this work, we identify the optimal schedule and route for mobile vaccination teams visiting patients in their homes and communities to meet patient demands while limiting travel costs.

We will partner with the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health (LACDPH) mobile vaccination team to ensure that our results will consider real-world challenges and considerations (letter of participation included). Nurses must be arranged into teams with specific compositions (e.g., in skills or language capability) to be deployed to an optimally chosen sequence of locations to minimize costs while ensuring adequate patient coverage. This includes location and scheduling constraints, travel cost and resource constraints, as well as labor force requirements that mandate specific working hours.

The resultant problem is of both practical and methodological importance. Besides having direct application to operations at the LACDPH, which serves almost 10 million county residents, this problem combines both aspects of scheduling and routing problems, resulting in a formulation of intersecting vehicle routing problems (VRPs) that must be solved simultaneously. VRPs are an active area of transportation research, and considering them within the context of team composition, as we do here, would push the boundaries of current transportation technological understanding.