An Integer Linear Programming for Hospital Bed Scheduling and Capacity Management

COVID-19 has struck the Philippines in December 2019 and has brought great panic to the country's healthcare system. In a short period of time, the number of infected increased exponentially. Hospitals are suddenly filled with patients infected by the virus to the extent that patients wait for hours to days to be admitted. Others die on the road even before finding hospitals that can accommodate them. The hospitals and the country's healthcare system must consider this increasing demand to serve patients fully. Patient planning is commonly used in other countries to maximize bed allocation. A recent study using Bernoulli Distributed Random Variable represents the binary integer program. The approach combines the queuing model and simulation to reduce the patient dismissal rate and increase hospital output. On the other hand, this paper deals with strategic hospital bed capacity optimization using linear integer programming by considering the diverse resources, such as doctors, nurses, beds, and hospital rooms. © 2022 ACM.

Facility Location Problem to Identify The Optimal Allocation of Near-Expired COVID-19 Vaccines

Coronavirus 2019, popularly known as COVID-19 and declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2020, has affected billions of people and claimed millions of lives. Leaders and corporations worldwide have worked feverishly to develop a vaccine to combat the virus. After numerous tests and trials, COVID-19 vaccines were developed. Given the magnitude of the need for vaccination, these vaccines should not go to waste due to expiration from slow-paced rollouts or oversupply. This study aims to maximize near-expired COVID-19 vaccines in cases of oversupply by distributing them in neighbouring facilities at a low delivery cost and by utilizing P-median modelling. All gathered data were loaded into and run through the AMPL simulation model, with varying P-values or the number of facilities to be located to act as suppliers to the remaining demand nodes. Following the model simulation, it was observed that the P-value is inversely proportional to the cost;therefore, the cost of delivering near-expired COVID-19 vaccines to the demand clusters decreases as the P-value increases. Through the simulation model, the researchers determined which node facilities, if opened, would incur the lowest delivery cost. © 2022 IEEE.