Covid-19 PPE distribution planning with demand priorities and supply uncertainties

The recent Covid-19 outbreak put healthcare resources under enormous pressure. Governments and healthcare authorities faced major challenges in securing and delivering critical supplies such as personal protective equipment (PPE) and test kits. As timely distribution of critical supplies exceeded government resources, certain sectors, negatively impacted by the pandemic, offered their storage and distribution capabilities; both helping with the crisis and creating economic revenue. We investigate the problem of optimally leveraging the capacity and efficiency of underutilized distribution networks to enhance the capability of government supply networks to meet healthcare needs for critical supplies. We model the problem as a dynamic distribution planning problem that decides on the re-purposing of storage facilities, the allocation of demand, and the timely distribution of limited PPE supplies to different jurisdictions. From a resource provider’s perspective, the goal is to maximize demand fulfillment based on priorities set out by the government, as well as maximize economic value to participating networks. As uncertainty is a prevalent feature of the problem, we adopt a robust framework due to the lack of historical data on such supply uncertainties. We provide a mixed integer programming formulation for the adversarial problem and present a cutting plane algorithm to solve the robust model efficiently under both polyhedral and ellipsoidal uncertainty sets. We build a case study for the province of Ontario, Canada, and run extensive analysis of the service and economic value trade-off, and the effects of modeling demand priorities and supply uncertainties.