A model for allocating resources during hospital evacuations

All hospitals must have an evacuation plan to ensure the safety of patients and prevent the loss of life. However, risk managers typically have not been able to quantify how resource availability, the cost of acquiring those resources, and evacuation completion time are related. This paper proposes a deterministic optimization approach for identifying the staffing and vehicle transport requirements, as well as the scheduling of these requirements, within a pre-specified evacuation time period while minimizing cost. Moreover, we provide these managers with a modeling framework that can indicate if their current resource set is inadequate to evacuate the patient population within the specified time period. We suggest a tailored solution approach that relaxes certain complicating integer constraints in an effort to find feasible, quality solutions. Using this optimization-based heuristic, we then evaluate the hospital evacuation problem, providing insights into the period-by-period requirements of nurses and vehicles, as well as how resource restrictions would affect the evacuation. Finally, we provide a comparison of minimizing cost against minimizing evacuation completion time, where we have a budget restriction in the latter case.