Journal of Industrial Engineering and Management Studies

Abstract Since human societies have endured massive financial disruptions and life losses after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is critical to eliminate this disease as soon as possible. Today, the invention of the COVID-19 vaccine made this objective more reachable. But unfortunately, the suppliant of the vaccines is limited. Hence, to prevent further lethal harms, it seems rational to use a scientific method for vaccine allocation. This study proposes a method for prioritizing the patients based on their level of life-threatening danger according to the proven risk factors (e.g., age, sex, pregnancy, and underlying diseases) of the COVID-19. That is a new data-driven decision-making method for patients’ classification based on their health condition information using several machine learning algorithms. In this method, vaccine applicants are classified into four classes. The scheduling of vaccine distribution would be conducted based on the results of this classification. Furthermore, a real-life case study is also investigated through the proposed method for better illumination in this paper. The vaccine distribution schedule of the real-case study has been performed with 94% accuracy. It should be mentioned that the main achievement of this research is to design a new efficient method for a vaccine distribution schedule.

Abstract This paper deals with optimizing the multi-door cross-docking scheduling problem for incoming and outgoing trucks. Contrary to previous studies, it first considers the simultaneous effects of learning and deteriorating on loading and unloading the jobs. A mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model is developed for this problem, in which the basic truck scheduling problem in a cross-docking system is strongly considered as NP-hardness. Thus, in this paper, meta-heuristic algorithms namely genetic algorithm, imperialist competitive algorithm, and a new hybrid meta-heuristic algorithm, resulted from the principal component analysis (PCA) and an imperialist competitive algorithm (ICA) called PCICA are proposed and used. Finally, the numerical results obtained from meta-heuristic algorithms are examined using the relative percentage deviation and time criteria. Results show that the hybrid PCICA algorithm performs better than the other algorithms in terms of the solution quality. Computational results indicate when the learning rate increases, its decreasing effect on processing time will growth and the objective function value is improved. Finally, the sensitivity analysis also indicates when the deterioration rate is reduced, its incremental effect is decreased over time.