A regionally coordinated allocation strategy for medical resources based on multidimensional uncertain information

Abstract

In the face of an emergency, regionally coordinated allocation is an important prerequisite for maintaining the normal order of production and living. Considering the complexity and uncertainty of the emergencies in local governments, this paper establishes a two-stage process for allocating medical resources. In the first stage, cooperative regions with incomplete weights and multidimensional uncertain information ranked via a novel decision-making method. The second stage is an optimal strategy which the optimization model is established to minimize the cost incurred by the local government considering two components of cost. The first stage is the reserve cost for the local government to prepare a certain amount of flexible procurement materials to respond to a public health emergency. The second is the scheduling cost when cooperative regions support medical resources. Theoretically, the optimal allocation of the reserve of different kinds of medical resources is deduced at the lowest cost. Through numerical simulation and sensitivity analysis, we explore the impacts of attribute weights, resource reserve capacity, unit costs, and the number of cooperative regions on the demand for different kinds of medical resources and the total costs incurred by local governments. This study provides a regional coordinated allocation framework and theoretical reference for government departments responding to the emergencies.