Public health emergencies such as disease outbreaks and bioterrorism attacks require immediate response to ensure the safety and well-being of the affected community and prevent the further spread of infection. The standard method to increase the efficiency of mass dispensing during health emergencies is to create emergency points called points of dispensing (PODs). PODs are sites for distributing medical services such as vaccines or drugs to the affected population within a specific time constraint. These PODs need to be sited in optimal locations and have people (demand points) assigned to them simultaneously; this is known as the location-allocation problem. PODs may need to be selected to serve the entire population (full allocation) or different priority or needs groups (partial allocation). Several previous studies have focused on location problems in different application domains, including healthcare. However, some of these studies focused on healthcare facility location problems without specifying location-allocation problems or the exact domain. This study presents a survey of the PODs location-allocation problem during public health emergencies. This survey aims to review and analyse the existing models for PODs location-allocation during public health emergencies based on full and partial demand points allocation. Moreover, it compares existing models based on their key features, strengths, and limitations. The challenges and future research directions for PODs location-allocation models are also discussed. The results of this survey demonstrated a necessity to develop a variety of techniques to analyse, define and meet the demand of particular groups. It also proved essential that models be developed for different countries, including accounting for variations in population size and density. Moreover, the model constraints, such as those relating to time or prioritizing certain groups, need to be considered in the solution. Finally, additional comparative studies are required to clarify which methods or models are adequate based on predefined criteria.

The correct distribution of service facilities can help keep fixed and overhead costs low while increasing accessibility. When an appropriate location is chosen, public-sector facilities, such as COVID-19 centers, can save lives faster and provide high-quality service to the community at a low cost. The purpose of the research is to highlight the issues related to the location of COVID-19 vaccine centers in the city of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. In particular, this paper aims to analyze the accessibility of COVID-19 vaccine centers in Jeddah city using maximal coverage location problems with and without constraint on the number and capacity of facilities. A maximal coverage model is first used to analyze the COVID-19 vaccination coverage of Jeddah districts with no restriction on the facility capacity. Then, a maximize capacitated coverage method is utilized to assess the centers’ distribution and demand coverage with capacity constraints. Finally, the minimize facilities model is used to identify the most optimal location required to satisfy all demand points with the least number of facilities. The optimization approaches consider the objective function of minimizing the overall transportation time and travel distance to reduce wastage on the service rate provided to the patients. The optimization model is applied to a real-world case study in the context of the COVID-19 vaccination center in Jeddah. The results of this study provide valuable information that can help decision-makers locate and relocate COVID-19 centers more effectively under different constraints conditions.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a network of distributed devices or sensors connected through the internet to allow gathering and sharing of data. The data generated by these devices is affected by anomalies or abnormal behaviour due to attack issues, or breakdown in devices, as examples. However, most current anomaly detection systems rely on labelled data, while the class labels for IoT data are usually unavailable. Furthermore, the manual labelling task is expensive and time-consuming to perform due to the need for domain experts. More importantly, the volume of data in the IoT is growing rapidly, creating a need to predict the classification labels for future data. This study proposes a Hybrid Learning Model which uses both Clustering and Classification methods (HLMCC) to automate the labelling process and detect anomalies in IoT data. The model consists of two practical phases, automatic labelling and detecting anomalies. First, the HLMCC groups the data into normal and anomaly clusters by adopting Hierarchical Affinity Propagation (HAP) clustering. Second, the labelled data obtained from the clustering phase is used to train the Decision Trees (DTs) and to classify future unseen data. The results show that the HLMCC is able to automate the labelling of data, which is beneficial to minimize human involvement. Moreover, HLMCC outperforms the DTs on the originally labelled datasets and the state-of-the-art model over a wide range of evaluation metrics based on the average ranks. HLMCC produces the highest average ranks against other models in terms of False Positive Rate (FPR), recall, precision and the Area Under the Precision-Recall curve (AUCPR) with 1.8, 1.6, 1.8 and 1.8, respectively.

The COVID-19 pandemic is one of the most devastating public health emergencies in history. In late 2020 and after almost a year from the initial outbreak of the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2), several vaccines were approved and administered in most countries. Saudi Arabia has established COVID-19 vaccination centers in all regions. Various facilities were selected to set up these vaccination centers, including conference and exhibition centers, old airport terminals, pre-existing medical facilities, and primary healthcare centers. Deciding the number and locations of these facilities is a fundamental objective for successful epidemic responses to ensure the delivery of vaccines and other health services to the entire population. This study analyzed the spatial distribution of COVID-19 vaccination centers in Jeddah, a major city in Saudi Arabia, by using GIS tools and methods to provide insight on the effectiveness of the selection and distribution of the COVID-19 vaccination centers in terms of accessibility and coverage. Based on a spatial analysis of vaccine centers’ coverage in 2020 and 2021 in Jeddah presented in this study, coverage deficiency would have been addressed earlier if the applied GIS analysis methods had been used by authorities while gradually increasing the number of vaccination centers. This study recommends that the Ministry of Health in Saudi Arabia evaluated the assigned vaccination centers to include the less-populated regions and to ensure equity and fairness in vaccine distribution. Adding more vaccine centers or reallocating some existing centers in the denser districts to increase the coverage in the uncovered sparse regions in Jeddah is also recommended. The methods applied in this study could be part of a strategic vaccination administration program for future public health emergencies and other vaccination campaigns.

Forecasting the subnational population accurately is needed for sustainable development, including planning for the future, allocating resources, or providing health services. Two approaches are used for forecasting subnational populations: local forecasting where a model is trained for each area, and global forecasting, where one model is trained with all areas. Local forecasting (e.g., statistical models) is limited to capturing the population growth patterns in a single area. Machine learning models, such as the light gradient boosting model (LGBM), are considered a more suitable approach for global forecasting, but it is limited to one-step predictions, leading to error accumulation. Also, combining several models into one ensemble model are used which helped in reduce forecasting errors. However, the nature of population growth is nonlinear, and there is a need to reduce error accumulation. This study overcomes these issues and proposes a population fusion transformer (PFT) as a global forecasting model for population forecasting, which outputs multi-step predictions. The PFT is based on a temporal fusion transformer (TFT) proposing a novel deep gated residual network (DGRN) block to capture data nonlinearity. This study also incorporates the proposed PFT model into various ensemble models to reduce forecasting errors using different prediction and learning approaches. The proposed models are applied to four subnational population datasets from several countries. The PFT model outperforms the LGBM and TFT with lower forecasting errors in three and two datasets. More importantly, combining the PFT with other models in ensemble models reduced errors further.