  Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has played an important role in the
prevention and control of the novel coronavirus pneumonia (COVID-19), and
community prevention has become the most essential part in reducing the spread
risk and protecting populations. However, most communities use a uniform TCM
prevention program for all residents, which violates the "treatment based on
syndrome differentiation" principle of TCM and limits the effectiveness of
prevention. In this paper, we propose an intelligent optimization method to
develop diversified TCM prevention programs for community residents. First, we
use a fuzzy clustering method to divide the population based on both modern
medicine and TCM health characteristics; we then use an interactive
optimization method, in which TCM experts develop different TCM prevention
programs for different clusters, and a heuristic algorithm is used to optimize
the programs under the resource constraints. We demonstrate the computational
efficiency of the proposed method and report its successful application to
TCM-based prevention of COVID-19 in 12 communities in Zhejiang province, China,
during the peak of the pandemic.
