Transportation and Location Planning During Epidemics/Pandemics: Emerging Problems and Solution Approaches

The sudden changes in human mobility, the immense increase in demand for logistics and delivery systems, governmental restrictions, and uncertainty of the spread dynamics have introduced several transportation and location-related decision problems during the COVID-19 pandemic. Hence, a variety of Operations Research (OR) tools and techniques have been applied to tackle these problems for mitigating the adverse effects of the spread. In this study, we first investigate the emerging decision problematics observed during epidemics/pandemics under four research clusters as: (i) effects of epidemics on transportation, (ii) effect of mobility on pandemic spread, (iii) logistics and delivery systems, and (iv) medical waste management and wastewater-based epidemiology. Next, we explore the OR tools implemented to solve the transportation and location-related decision problems in each cluster.