On April 3, I had the opportunity to present some of our recent work on POD resupply planning to some folks at the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments. My presentation and the subsequent discussion focused on the operational phase, after PODs have received some initial supplies, but more needs to be delivered (because not everything arrived in time or because those directing the effort want to avoid distributing medication to the wrong place). The key idea of the plan I presented is that PODs would be continuously resupplied (from one or more local depots) during an event. Each POD would be assigned to a truck route, and each truck would continuously loop from a depot to the PODs on its route and back to the depot. At each POD, the truck would deliver just enough medication to bring the inventory at that POD back to a predetermined target level. I also presented a rough-cut planning model (implemented in a spreadsheet) for this type of operation.
The planning questions involve determining what size trucks are needed for each route (or, are evaluating whether the available trucks are large enough) and determining what the target inventory level should be at each POD. We also discussed the problem of what if deliveries to the depot (from the state or federal level) are delayed and issues related to PODs of different sizes.
If any planners are considering this problem and have developed models that they would like to share or would like more information about the models that we’re developing, please let me know at jwh2@umd.edu.
