Assignment of Patients to Hospitals in a Case of a Large-Scale Earthquake

The main topic of this thesis is the transportation of injured persons to the hospitals after a large-scale disaster. The main tool for solving the problem is machine scheduling. Machine scheduling in production planning activities of enterprises is a frequent activity in short-term planning and it is very important to use resources efficiently. The scheduling of identical parallel machines is adapted to the humanitarian logistics problem. List scheduling method is applied for makespan minimization. The results show comparisons of the shortest processing time (SPT) and longest processing time (LPT) rules to get the optimum sequence for the addressed problem by an algorithm. For the heuristic method; single vehicle, 2 vehicles and 3 vehicles cases are discussed. First of all, both demographic and geographic information have provided about Istanbul. It is assumed that in a case of a large-scale earthquake in İstanbul, the city is divided into regions by Voronoi diagram. The strategy is to dispatch him/her to the closest hospital according to location of the victim. The objective function of the study is to maximize the number of seriously injured people in post-disaster period by a proper assignment of existing ambulances to patients and the expected value of service level at the same time. The service level increases as the expected travel distance of patients decreases having inverse relation. Keywords: Humanitarian logistics, Earthquake, Disaster management, List scheduling, Heuristic method.