Fair allocation of personal protective equipment to health centers during early phases of a pandemic

We consider the problem of allocating personal protective equipment, namely surgical and respiratory masks, to health centers under extremely limited supply. formulate a multi-objective multi-period non-linear resource allocation model for this with objectives minimizing number infected workers, patients deprivation cost function defined over shortages. solve resulting using ε-constraint algorithm so as obtain exact Pareto set. also develop customized genetic an approximate frontier in reasonable time larger instances. provide comparative analysis heuristic methods various scenarios give insights on how suggested allocations outperform ones obtained through set rule-of-thumb policies, policies that are implemented owing their simplicity ease-of-implementation. Our shows circumstances get worse, trade-off between ratio infections deepens proposed gives very close solutions frontier, especially pessimistic scenarios. observed while some such last-in-first-receives type policy work well terms costs optimistic scenarios, others like split perform neutral or settings. While favoring one objectives, these typically fail good other objective; hence if be choice would depend characteristics priorities makers. Overall, by imply more complicated distribution schemes not induced needed best results.