Designing a sustainable-resilient-responsive supply chain network considering uncertainty in the COVID-19 era.

Effective supply chain management is crucial for economic growth, and sustainability is becoming a key consideration for large companies. COVID-19 has presented significant challenges to supply chains, making PCR testing a vital product during the pandemic. It detects the presence of the virus if you are infected at the time and detects fragments of the virus even after you are no longer infected. This paper proposes a multi-objective mathematical linear model to optimize a sustainable, resilient, and responsive supply chain for PCR diagnostic tests. The model aims to minimize costs, negative societal impact caused by shortages, and environmental impact, using a scenario-based approach with stochastic programming. The model is validated by investigating a real-life case study in one of Iran's high-risk supply chain areas. The proposed model is solved using the revised multi-choice goal programming method. Lastly, sensitivity analyses based on effective parameters are conducted to analyze the behavior of the developed Mixed-Integer Linear Programming. According to the results, not only is the model capable of balancing three objective functions, but it is also capable of providing resilient and responsive networks. To enhance the design of the supply chain network, this paper has considered various COVID-19 variants and their infectious rates, in contrast to prior studies that did not consider the variations in demand and societal impact exhibited by different virus variants.

The IoT-enabled sustainable reverse supply chain for COVID-19 Pandemic Wastes (CPW).

Supply chains have been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, which is the most recent worldwide disaster. After the world health organization recognized the latest phenomena as a pandemic, nations became incapacitated to provide the required medical supplies. In the current situation, the world seeks an essential solution for COVID-19 Pandemic Wastes (CPWs) by pushing the pandemic to a stable condition. In this study, the development of a supply chain network is contrived for CPWs utilizing optimization modeling tools. Also, an IoT platform is devised to enable the proposed model to retrieve real-time data from IoT devices and set them as the model's inputs. Moreover, sustainability aspects are appended to the proposed IoT-enabled model considering its triplet pillars as objective functions. A real case of Puebla city and 15 experiments are used to validate the model. Furthermore, a combination of metaheuristic algorithms utilized to solve the model and also seven evaluation indicators endorse the selection of efficient solution approaches. The evaluation indicators are appointed as the inputs of statistical and multicriteria decision-making hybridization to prioritize the algorithms. The result of the Entropy Weights method and Combined Compromise Solution approach confirms that MOGWO has better performance for the medium-sizes, case study and an overall view. Also, NSHHO outclasses the small-size and large-size experiments.

Disaster relief supply chain design for personal protection equipment during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The global epidemic caused by novel coronavirus continues to be a crisis in the world and a matter of concern. The way the epidemic has wreaked havoc on the international level has become difficult for the healthcare systems to supply adequately personal protection equipment for medical personnel all over the globe. In this paper, considering the COVID-19 outbreak, a multi-objective, multi-product, and multi-period model for the personal protection equipment demands satisfaction aiming to optimize total cost and shortage, simultaneously, is developed. The model is embedded with instances and validated by both modern and classic multi-objective metaheuristic algorithms. Moreover, the Taguchi method is exploited to set the metaheuristic into their best performances by finding their parameters' optimum level. Furthermore, fifteen test examples are designed to prove the established PPE supply chain model and tuned algorithms' applicability. Among the test examples, one is related to a real case study in Iran. Finally, metaheuristics are evaluated by a series of related metrics through different statistical analyses. It can be concluded from the obtained results that solution methods are practical and valuable to achieve the efficient shortage level and cost.

Recovery solutions for ecotourism centers during the Covid-19 pandemic: Utilizing Fuzzy DEMATEL and Fuzzy VIKOR methods.

Obviously, the Covid-19 pandemic has huge impact on most businesses and has caused serious and countless problems for them. Therefore, providing solutions for affected businesses to recover and improve their activities during pandemic times is inevitable. In this regard, ecotourism centers are one of the businesses that went through this problem and have faced significant dilemmas in their activities. Also, reportedly, there is no related research focusing on the recovery approaches to address these obstacles relating to these kinds of businesses during the pandemic. Therefore, all of these exhorted us to do the current research. In this paper, some practical and useful action plans for ecotourism centers are firstly developed to help these businesses. To obtain the action plans, some brainstorming sessions were held consisting of tourism experts, university professors, managers, owners, and some personnel of eco-tourism centers. In order to prioritize the defined action plans, four criteria are considered. Firstly, we compute the weights of the considered criteria by the Fuzzy DEMATEL and then they are prioritized using the Fuzzy VIKOR. The findings of the current study divulge that the AP2 "Standardization of the centers" and AP3 "Estimating demand number and increasing the capacity" and AP7 "Identifying other natural tourist attractions of the region" have the highest and lowest priority to be implemented.

Relief Supply Chain Management Using Internet of Things to Address COVID-19 Outbreak.

Nowadays, due to the COVID-19 outbreak, the most significant factor to be considered all over the world is to manage this pandemic and especially to address positive cases, efficiently and effectively. This can be achieved by simultaneously utilizing the present network with supply chain settings and also the Internet of Things (IoT). This consideration enables the accurate monitoring of suspected cases in real-time to optimize total service time. Hence, this paper firstly designs two sub-models to minimize distance and traffic while minimizing total response time. Our main contribution in this paper is to develop a dynamic scheme using IoT to deal with suspected cases. We also investigate the proposed methodology on a real case problem in Canada. A comprehensive analysis of the proposed methodology behavior has been conducted and the results showed the managerial decision-making process to address COVID-19 patients. The proposed approach establishes efficient strategies to identify suspicious COVID-19 cases and provide them with medical observance in a short time when utilized with IoT. The obtained results of the considered scenarios show 12% up to 15% improvement in the ambulance response time when using IoT.

Utilizing IoT to design a relief supply chain network for the SARS-COV-2 pandemic.

The current universally challenging SARS-COV-2 pandemic has transcended all the social, logical, economic, and mortal boundaries regarding global operations. Although myriad global societies tried to address this issue, most of the employed efforts seem superficial and failed to deal with the problem, especially in the healthcare sector. On the other hand, the Internet of Things (IoT) has enabled healthcare system for both better understanding of the patient's condition and appropriate monitoring in a remote fashion. However, there has always been a gap for utilizing this approach on the healthcare system especially in agitated condition of the pandemics. Therefore, in this study, we develop two innovative approaches to design a relief supply chain network is by using IoT to address multiple suspected cases during a pandemic like the SARS-COV-2 outbreak. The first approach (prioritizing approach) minimizes the maximum ambulances response time, while the second approach (allocating approach) minimizes the total critical response time. Each approach is validated and investigated utilizing several test problems and a real case in Iran as well. A set of efficient meta-heuristics and hybrid ones is developed to optimize the proposed models. The proposed approaches have shown their versatility in various harsh SARS-COV-2 pandemic situations being dealt with by managers. Finally, we compare the two proposed approaches in terms of response time and route optimization using a real case study in Iran. Implementing the proposed IoT-based methodology in three consecutive weeks, the results showed 35.54% decrease in the number of confirmed cases.