Abstract:

To address the severe challenges to epidemic prevention and control caused by limited medical treatment capacity and insufficient emergency protective materials at the early stage of major sudden epidemics, research on the dynamic allocation of emergency protective materials was conducted in this study. Firstly, considering the time-varying characteristics of the severity of symptoms among infected patients during epidemic evolution, a Susceptible-Exposed-Infected-Recovered-Dead (SEIRD) epidemic evolution model integrating protective material allocation and optimized patient treatment was proposed to simulate epidemic spread. Subsequently, a multi-period dynamic allocation decision model for limited emergency protective materials was established under constrained medical treatment capacity, and a simulated annealing(SA) algorithm was designed to solve the model according to the problem characteristics. Finally, numerical examples were adopted to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method, and sensitivity analyses of key parameters were performed. The results demonstrate that the constructed dynamic allocation decision model can effectively improve the utilization efficiency of limited emergency medical resources, and the dynamic allocation strategy delivers the optimal epidemic prevention and control effect when applied at the early stage of an outbreak. In addition, both the supplementation in emergency protective materials and the expansion of hospital treatment capacity exhibit diminishing marginal effects.

Key words: treatment capacity, emergency protective materials, dynamic allocation, epidemic outbreak, interactive coupling