Department of Industrial Engineering, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Lodve Langesgate 2, 8514 Narvik, Norway.
School of Economics and Management, China Three Gorges University, Yichang 443002, China.
Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2020 Mar 9;17(5):1770. doi: 10.3390/ijerph17051770.
The outbreak of an epidemic disease may pose significant treats to human beings and may further lead to a global crisis. In order to control the spread of an epidemic, the effective management of rapidly increased medical waste through establishing a temporary reverse logistics system is of vital importance. However, no research has been conducted with the focus on the design of an epidemic reverse logistics network for dealing with medical waste during epidemic outbreaks, which, if improperly treated, may accelerate disease spread and pose a significant risk for both medical staffs and patients. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel multi-objective multi-period mixed integer program for reverse logistics network design in epidemic outbreaks, which aims at determining the best locations of temporary facilities and the transportation strategies for effective management of the exponentially increased medical waste within a very short period. The application of the model is illustrated with a case study based on the outbreak of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in Wuhan, China. Even though the uncertainty of the future COVID-19 spread tendency is very high at the time of this research, several general policy recommendations can still be obtained based on computational experiments and quantitative analyses. Among other insights, the results suggest installing temporary incinerators may be an effective solution for managing the tremendous increase of medical waste during the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, but the location selection of these temporary incinerators is of significant importance. Due to the limitation on available data and knowledge at present stage, more real-world information are needed to assess the effectiveness of the current solution.
传染病的爆发可能对人类构成重大威胁，并可能进一步导致全球危机。为了控制传染病的传播，通过建立临时逆向物流系统对迅速增加的医疗废物进行有效管理至关重要。然而，针对传染病爆发期间医疗废物处理的传染病逆向物流网络设计，尚无研究聚焦于此，如果处理不当，可能会加速疾病传播，并对医护人员和患者构成重大风险。因此，本文提出了一种用于传染病爆发时逆向物流网络设计的多目标多周期混合整数规划模型，旨在确定临时设施的最佳位置和运输策略，以在极短的时间内对指数级增长的医疗废物进行有效管理。该模型的应用通过基于中国武汉 2019 冠状病毒病（COVID-19）爆发的案例研究进行说明。尽管在进行这项研究时，未来 COVID-19 传播趋势的不确定性非常高，但仍可以根据计算实验和定量分析得出一些一般政策建议。除其他见解外，结果表明，在武汉 COVID-19 爆发期间，安装临时焚烧炉可能是管理医疗废物大量增加的有效解决方案，但这些临时焚烧炉的位置选择非常重要。由于目前阶段可用数据和知识的限制，需要更多的实际信息来评估当前解决方案的有效性。
