Capacity Planning for Patient’s special needs

Product Used: Route Optimization API

Background

A non-emergency medical transportation (NEMT) service operates in an urban area where they frequently transport patients who require different types of support, including those who use wheelchairs, stretchers, or regular seating. Some of the minivans that the operator owns, are equipped to carry stretchers and wheelchairs, if needed. In order to minimize his operating costs, the NEMT provider favors using these minivans for carrying patients with different requirements.

However, the complex routing requirements along with timing constraints pose a challenge to plan the capacity and assignments efficiently. Since not all minivans are equipped to carry wheelchairs and stretchers, the operator faces a risk of poor planning and execution leading to waiting delays, logistical challenges and higher operating costs eventually.

Problem Statements

The NEMT provider wants to

1. Optimize capacity utilization: The NEMT provider wants to leverage various loading configurations for every trip based on the requirements of those patients that are supposed to be part of the next trip.
2. Minimize operational costs by minimizing the trip distance and save fuel costs.

Solution

NextBillion.ai’s Route Optimization API’s advanced capabilities can identify the right capacity configurations for a given set of patients and their individual requirements. The NEMT operator needs to provide the different loading configurations for the minivans and the patients which would require those special accommodations. The optimizer takes into account the various combinations, and creates a route plan where the assignments and capacity utilization are optimized.

Leverage alternative capacity configurations

We will use a combination of features across the shipments and vehicles attributes to solve this problem. First, we will establish a capacity configuration rule for indicating patients with special seating requirements.

We will leverage the mulit-dimensional capabilities of shipment amounts to configure the patient’s seating requirements.

Next, we define the carrying capacities of a vehicle under usual circumstances using the vehicle’s capacity property. Let’s assume a minivan can house 6 patients if there are no requirements to onboard any stretchers or wheelchairs.

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“capacity” : [6, 0, 0]

But, if needed, the minivans can either accommodate 2 patients needing wheelchairs and 4 regular patients and no stretchers, or else it can accommodate 1 stretcher and 2 regular patients and no wheelchairs. Here, we make of the use alternative_capacities feature to set these loading configurations

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“alternative_capacities” : [  
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        [4, 2, 0]  
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        [2, 0, 1]  
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     ]

Specifying these alternative capacities along with regular capacities informs the optimizer of the available loading configuration options. It chooses one of them based on the special requirements of the patients it needs to plan trips for.

Minimize operational costs

Reducing the fuel consumption of the minivans when transporting patients will reduce the operating cost per trip and improve the margins. We can initialize the optimizer to minimize the overall distance of these trips to save fuel.

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"options": {  
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       "objective": {  
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           "travel_cost": "distance"  
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           }  
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       }

Sample request and solution

Here is a full sample JSON request that we built for this case and the corresponding response

API Request

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curl --location 'https://api.nextbillion.io/optimization/v2?key=<your_api_key>'   
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--header 'Content-Type: application/json'   
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--data '{...}'

API Response

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{
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     "description": "NEMT - Capacity Utilization",   
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    "result": "{...}",
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    "status": "Ok",  
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    "message": ""  
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}

In the response we can see that the chosen capacity configuration is returned in the response as adopted_capacity. Consequently, we observe that the optimizer chooses the best capacity configuration for the given set of patients and assigns them to the right minivan which can accommodate them and addresses the routing challenges faced by the NEMT provider.