Vehicle routing for the urgent delivery of face shields during the COVID-19 pandemic
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Vehicle routing for the urgent delivery of face shields during the COVID‑19 pandemic Joaquín Pacheco1 · Manuel Laguna2 Received: 8 July 2020 / Revised: 3 August 2020 / Accepted: 7 August 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract The speed by which the COVID-19 pandemic spread throughout the world caught some national and local governments unprepared. Healthcare systems found themselves struggling to increase capacity and procure key supplies, such as personal protective equipment. Protective face shields became essential for healthcare professionals. However, most hospitals and healthcare facilities did not have them in adequate quantities. The urgency of producing and delivering face shields increased as the number of COVID-19 cases rapidly multiplied. This was the situation that we encountered in the city and province of Burgos (Spain). Since there was no time to wait for a large manufacturer to produce face shields, private citizens and small companies volunteered to make them using technologies such as 3D printers. Nonprofits, citizens, and governments agencies volunteered to deliver materials to the face shield makers and to pick up and deliver the face shields to health centers and other locations where they were needed. This resulted in a vehicle routing problem with some special characteristics that made it different from models used for commercial purposes. We describe the development of a heuristic to find feasible and efficient routes for this problem. We highlight the advantages of using heuristics in an emergency context like the one triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, the heuristic approach allowed us to design, implement, test, and delivery a routing system in less than 1 week from the time that the local government contacted us with what they described as a logistics nightmare. Keywords Coronavirus · Humanitarian logistics · Heuristic optimization · Tabu search
* Joaquín Pacheco [email protected] 1
University of Burgos, Burgos, Spain
2
University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, USA
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J. Pacheco, M. Laguna
1 Introduction Healthcare facilities and professionals were, for the most part, caught unprepared for the magnitude of the COVID-19 pandemic. On March 23–27, 2020, the Office of Inspector General (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services) conduced brief telephone interviews (“pulse surveys”) with a random sample of administrators from 323 hospitals across 46 States, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico.1 The survey key takeaway was: Hospitals reported that their most significant challenges centered on testing and caring for patients with known or suspected COVID-19 and keeping staff safe. Hospitals also reported substantial challenges maintaining or expanding their facilities’ capacity to treat patients with COVID-19. Hospitals described specific challenges, mitigation strategies, and needs for assistance related to personal protective equipment (PPE), testing, staffing, supplies and durable equipment;
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