# Transportation and Reserve of Emergency Medical Supplies during Public Health Events
## 6 Discussion
### Future Studies  
This paper studies public health issues, taking the recent COVID-19 epidemic as the research object, aiming to predict the demand for emergency medical materials and optimize VRPTW. Some aspects of this paper need to be further improved, including the following aspects:  
* Mode of transportation and storage of emergency medical materials:  
Considering the strong infectivity and high invisibility of the outbreak, we need to further investigate whether there are surplus stocks in medical institutions to allocate emergency medical supplies directly. On this basis, a bi-level programming mathematical model is established, which takes the minimum total transportation cost as the objective function and considers the constraints such as distance between hospitals and transit time. An improved metaheuristic algorithm is designed to solve the problem, and the optimal solution is obtained. In the process of solving the model, the amount of materials left by the vehicle must be fully considered to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the final result;
* Demand forecasting:  
Although this paper predicts the number of infected people based on the initial data on the actual epidemic situation in China, there is some subjectivity in the set demand volume of emergency medical materials for various affected people. Furthermore, this article only considers the demand for emergency medical materials, without considering the quantity of other emergency materials, and the types of emergency materials are diverse during the disaster;
* Path planning:  
Taking a single logistics distribution center as an example, this paper makes an in-depth study on this VRPTW problem and considers the timeliness of emergency medical materials. To better cope with the actual public health emergency rescue scenario, it is necessary to establish a distribution route optimization model considering the dynamic demand for various emergency materials;
* Solution algorithm:  
In this paper, the PSO algorithm is used to solve the approximate optimization model, and the approximate optimal solution of the optimal distribution path is obtained. However, with the in-depth development of algorithms, more metaheuristic algorithms suitable for a specific context will emerge. And the selection of algorithms may produce diversity, so different algorithms should be selected for different contexts;  
* Inclusion of new technologies:  
There are new technologies that can improve the efficiency of public health incident responses. For example, the use of additive manufacturing (AM) technology has become widespread in recent years, which has been demonstrated that AM can be used as an emergency solution for supply chain (SC) disruptions [52]. AM technology can be very helpful in the recovery and reconstruction of emergency medical supply chains. It helps to increase the resilience of the emergency medical supplies supply chain. These new technologies can greatly improve the efficiency of emergency material mobilization and stockpiling and provide new decision-making options, which could be considered in future research.