Journal Article

Multi-Objective Algorithm for Blood Supply via Unmanned Aerial Vehicles to the Wounded in an Emergency Situation

Wen, Tingxi, Zhang, Zhongnan, Wong, Kelvin K. L.

2016

Overview

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has been widely used in many industries. In the medical environment, especially in some emergency situations, UAVs play an important role such as the supply of medicines and blood with speed and efficiency. In this paper, we study the problem of multi-objective blood supply by UAVs in such emergency situations. This is a complex problem that includes maintenance of the supply blood's temperature model during transportation, the UAVs' scheduling and routes' planning in case of multiple sites requesting blood, and limited carrying capacity. Most importantly, we need to study the blood's temperature change due to the external environment, the heating agent (or refrigerant) and time factor during transportation, and propose an optimal method for calculating the mixing proportion of blood and appendage in different circumstances and delivery conditions. Then, by introducing the idea of transportation appendage into the traditional Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP), this new problem is proposed according to the factors of distance and weight. Algorithmically, we use the combination of decomposition-based multi-objective evolutionary algorithm and local search method to perform a series of experiments on the CVRP public dataset. By comparing our technique with the traditional ones, our algorithm can obtain better optimization results and time performance.

• Publisher: Public Library of Science,Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subject: Aircraft - instrumentation / Algorithms / Analysis / Biology and Life Sciences / Blood / Blood Transfusion - utilization / Carrying capacity / Delivery scheduling / Ecology and Environmental Sciences / Emergency Medical Dispatch - methods / Emergency Medical Dispatch - supply & distribution / Emergency medical services / Emergency vehicles / Engineering and Technology / Evolutionary algorithms / Excipients - chemistry / Fuel consumption / Humans / Medicine and Health Sciences / Multiple objective analysis / Optimization / Physical Sciences / Remotely piloted vehicles / Research and Analysis Methods / Robotics - instrumentation / Route planning / Routing / Temperature / Temperature changes / Transportation / Traveling salesman problem / Unmanned aerial vehicles / Vehicle routing / War-Related Injuries - therapy / Warfare and Armed Conflicts