Lead pipe remediation budgets are limited and ought to maximize public health impact. This goal implies a non-trivial optimization problem; lead service lines connect water mains to individual houses, but any realistic replacement strategy must batch replacements at a larger scale. Additionally, planners typically lack a principled method for comparing the relative public health value of potential interventions and often plan projects based on non-health factors. This paper describes a simple process for estimating child health impact at a parcel level by cleaning and synthesizing municipal datasets that are commonly available but seldom joined due to data quality issues. Using geocoding as the core record linkage mechanism, parcel-level toxicity data can be combined with school enrollment records to indicate where young children and lead lines coexist. A harm metric of estimated exposure-years is described at the parcel level, which can then be aggregated to the project level and minimized globally by posing project selection as a 0/1 knapsack problem. Simplifying further for use by non-experts, the implied linear programming relaxation is solved intuitively with the greedy algorithm; ordering projects by benefit cost ratio produces a priority list which planners can then consider holistically alongside harder to quantify factors. A case study demonstrates the successful application of this framework to a small U.S. city's existing data to prioritize federal infrastructure funding. While this paper focuses on lead in drinking water, the approach readily generalizes to other sources of residential toxicity with disproportionate impact on children.
翻译:铅管补救预算有限,应该最大限度地扩大公共卫生影响。这个目标意味着一个非三重优化问题;铅服务线将水干干与单个房屋连接起来,但任何现实的替代战略都必须分批进行更大规模的替代;此外,规划者通常缺乏一项原则性方法,以比较潜在干预措施相对公共卫生价值,并经常根据非健康因素规划项目。本文件描述了通过清洁和综合常见但因数据质量问题而很少加入的城市数据集,在一个包级评估儿童健康影响的简单程序。使用地理编码作为核心记录连接机制,包裹级毒性数据可以与学校入学率记录相结合,以表明幼儿和铅线共存的地点。估计接触年的危害度指标在包级上描述,然后将其汇总到项目一级,并通过将项目选择作为0/1 knapsack问题在全球范围最小化。进一步简化非专家使用隐含的线性方案编制松绑的方法,与贪婪的算法直接地解决了隐含的线性方案编制松动;以利益成本比率来订购项目,然后用一个优先清单,规划者可以在整体上考虑幼儿和铅线条共存,同时考虑在联邦基础设施中采用何种优先度因素。案例研究。 案例研究 向目前对城市进行试验重点研究。