Methodology of emergency medical logistics for public health emergencies

•This work addresses the issue of public health emergencies.•The proposed model characterizes the differences in survivor infection conditions.•Extended model considers spatial interaction relationships among epidemic areas.•This work integrates survivor psychology with medical relief emergency logistics.

This work presents a novel model of emergency medical logistics for quick response to public health emergencies. The proposed methodology consists of two recursive mechanisms: (1) the time-varying forecasting of medical relief demand and (2) relief distribution. The medical demand associated with each epidemic area is forecast according to a modified susceptible-exposed-infected-recovered model. A linear programming approach is then applied to facilitate distribution decision-making. The physical and psychological fragility of affected people are discussed. Numerical studies are conducted. Results show that the consideration of survivor psychology significantly reduces the psychological fragility of affected people, but it barely influences physical fragility.