Optimizing the supply of essential goods under closed-off management: A case study of COVID-19()

The COVID-19 pandemic is threatening people's health and economic development around the world. Many areas and cities are opting for actions such as lockdown or closed-off management to prevent rapid spread of the virus. Under these actions, it is necessary and important to guarantee the supply of essential goods. In this paper, we develop a multi-objective optimization model to optimize the supply of essential goods under closed-off management. A mixed binary integer programming model is built to help identify the optimal safety stock level as well as the supply network so that the demands for essential goods could be guaranteed. The effectiveness of our method is demonstrated by an example. We also perform sensitivity analysis for key parameters. Our work provides a reasonable solution for the supply of essential goods under closed-off management.