A Scenario-based optimization model to design a hub network for covid-19 medical equipment management

The provision of medical equipment during pandemics is one of the most crucial issues to be dealt with by health managers. This issue has revealed itself in the context of the COVID-19 outbreak in many hospitals and medical centers. Excessive demand for ventilators has led to a shortage of this equipment in several medical centers. Therefore, planning to manage critical hospital equipment and transfer the equipment between different hospitals in the event of a pandemic can be used as a quick fix. In this paper, a multi-objective optimization model is proposed to deal with the problem of hub network design to manage the distribution of hospital equipment in the face of epidemic diseases such as Covid-19. The objective functions of the model include minimizing transfer costs, minimizing the destructive environmental effects of transportation, and minimizing the delivery time of equipment between hospitals. Since it is difficult to estimate the demand, especially in the conditions of disease outbreaks, this parameter is considered a scenario-based one under uncertain conditions. To evaluate the performance of the proposed model, a case study in the eastern region of Iran is investigated and sensitivity analysis is performed on the model outputs. The sensitivity of the model to changing the cost parameters related to building infrastructure between hubs and also vehicle capacity is analyzed too. The results revealed that the proposed model can produce justified and optimal global solutions and, therefore, can solve real-world problems.