Genetic Algorithm for Determining Optimal Scheduling of Epidemic Interviews

The article describes the process of scheduling interviews with patients during an epidemic of foodborne diseases. Interviews with patients must be conducted in a relatively short time. Then, the dates, places and nutritional content of eating food are determined within a fixed number of days before the first symptoms of illness. The people with whom the food was eaten are also recorded. The number of patients to be interviewed is relatively large compared to the number of sanitary inspectors. Therefore, there is a need to establish a schedule for interviews. This must be done in the shortest possible time to determine the sources of spreading the disease as quickly as possible. Every day, new patients arrive dynamically, so the process of modifying the interview schedule is permanent. Such a problem for epidemics of foodborne diseases is not considered in the literature. The article presents a mathematical model of the task of determining interviews strategy. The problem of optimizing the scheduling of interviews was formulated. A genetic algorithm for determining the strategy of epidemic interviews with patients has been described, taking into account the minimization of the execution time of the designated schedule. The results of the experiments allow for the determination of qualitative and quantitative characteristics for carrying out exercises for sanitary inspectors for hypothetical outbreaks of foodborne diseases in relation to the epidemic interviews strategy.