Critical Medical Resource Allocation during COVID-19 Pandemic

TL;DR

This paper presents an optimal resource allocation framework for critical medical supplies during a pandemic, considering regional demand, government hierarchy, and disaster severity, demonstrated through a case study on oxygen distribution in India.

Contribution

It introduces a novel framework that dynamically allocates resources based on pandemic progression, regional needs, and organizational levels, improving upon static allocation methods.

Findings

Framework effectively minimizes demand and supply mismatch.

Case study demonstrates practical application for oxygen distribution.

Model accommodates regional severity and hierarchical decision-making.

Abstract

In this paper, an optimal resource allocation framework is proposed for the allocation of critical medical resources among different units during a pandemic. The framework is developed by considering the dynamics of Pandemic, hierarchical government structure, and non-uniformity of unit resource requirement among different units. The cost function is designed to minimize the difference between the demand, actual allocation, and ideal allocation, where ideal allocation for a region is considered based on the predicted active cases in a fraction of predicted total active cases of all regions. Different cost functions are used at a different level of organization based on the available information. The model can also accommodate severity of disaster in a region in this framework. A sample allocation case study is presented for the allocation of oxygen for different states of India.