Optimization of emergency medical low-carbon cold chain transportation routes considering hospital priority during an epidemic outbreak

At the beginning of 2020, during the sudden outbreak of the novel coronavirus in Wuhan, the hoarding, untimeliness, lack of transparency and unreasonable distribution of rescue medical cold chain materials also exposed the drawbacks of domestic medical logistics emergency distribution. Therefore, it is particularly important to study the optimization of the emergency medical cold chain material distribution routes mainly for hospitals. Firstly, the K-means clustering algorithm is used to classify the hospital priorities. Subsequently, this paper proposes two situations: shortage of goods and lack of goods, and constructs a path optimization model with the total cost as the objective function. Finally, the improved ant colony algorithm is adopted to solve the model. The results show that through simulation to verify the validity and rationality of the model, this method can effectively solve the truck routing problem of priority emergency allocation in hospitals.