An evolutonary/meta-heuristic approach to emergency resource redistribution in the developing world

摘要

The problem of logistics and resource management in disease control proejcts in the developing world can hardly be understated. One example ins the occurance of regional imbaalances in supply. A prototype system, based upon evolutionary and `meta-heuristic' optimisation techniques is described that recommends a plan for the redistribution of available resources to minimse shortages. Evaluation of the system on data from real world situations indicated that the generation of good, feasible redistribution plans is possible even on large datasets. Comparison of the optimisers showed that evolutionary techniques perform poorly on this problem compared to stochastic hill climbing.