Drone-Aided Healthcare Services for Patients with Chronic Diseases in Rural Areas

Abstract

This paper addresses the drone-aided delivery and pickup planning of medication and test kits for patients with chronic diseases who are required to visit clinics for routine health examinations and/or refill medicine in rural areas. For routine healthcare services, the work proposes two models: the first model is to find the optimal number of drone center locations using the set covering approach, and the second model is the multi-depot vehicle routing problem with pickup and delivery requests minimizing the operating cost of drones in which drones deliver medicine to patients and pick up exam kits on the way back such as blood and urine samples. In order to improve computational performance of the proposed models, a preprocessing algorithm, a Partition method, and a Lagrangian Relaxation (LR) method are developed as solution approaches. A cost-benefit analysis method is developed as a tool to analyze the benefits of drone-aided healthcare service. The work is tested on a numerical example to show its applicability.

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