Relief Supply Chain Management Using Internet of Things to Address COVID-19 Outbreak

Abstract

Nowadays, due to the COVID-19 outbreak, the most significant factor to be considered all over the world is to manage this pandemic and especially to address positive cases, efficiently and effectively. This can be achieved by simultaneously utilizing the present network with supply chain settings and also the Internet of Things (IoT). This consideration enables the accurate monitoring of suspected cases in real-time to optimize total service time. Hence, this paper firstly designs two sub-models to minimize distance and traffic while minimizing total response time. Our main contribution in this paper is to develop a dynamic scheme using IoT to deal with suspected cases. We also investigate the proposed methodology on a real case problem in Canada. A comprehensive analysis of the proposed methodology behavior has been conducted and the results showed the managerial decision-making process to address COVID-19 patients. The proposed approach establishes efficient strategies to identify suspicious COVID-19 cases and provide them with medical observance in a short time when utilized with IoT. The obtained results of the considered scenarios show 12% up to 15% improvement in the ambulance response time when using IoT.

Keywords: COVID-19; Humanitarian Logistics; Industry 4.0; Relief Supply Chain; Supply Chain Design.