Short-Term Routing Models for COVID-19 Treatment Transfer Between Hospitals

ABSTRACT

While technologies enable better observation and control over supply chain dynamics through visibility and real-time data analytics, the COVID-19 pandemic has intensified disruption-related challenges to supply chain network dynamics. Thus, these increased uncertainties and risks make it impossible to proactively predict the areas and sizes of surges in COVID-19 infections without limiting people’s freedom of movement. This notion implies that we may need to focus on reactive planning to transfer COVID-19 treatment between hospitals and/or hospital systems. We introduce an optimization model for reactive short-term vehicle routings for such transfers. The optimization model proposed in this study can simultaneously grasp vehicle movement and cargo location information while minimizing the total travel time of vehicles, which can handle the urgency of treatment transfers by changing the value of the limited travel time of vehicles. Although the model does not include every condition that can be considered in the treatment transfers between hospitals, it shows the potential of the model we proposed in the transfer of treatment in case of shortages. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.