Decision Models

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, health professionals, government policymakers, companies, community workers, and individual households have to design new systems and procedures to fight the rapid spread of the virus, where they face many operations management decision-making problems. Below we tackle the decision making problems facing the pandemic with optimization models.

Bus Network Redesign and Timetable Optimization

Collaborating with University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI) and University of Michigan Campus Transportation & Parking Department, we redesign the University of Michigan Campus Transit System to adapt to the pandemic-influenced course schedules and student activities. We validate the results via simulation and further improve the design with practical considerations.

An Interactive Game for Showing Effects of Business Reopen & Closedown Decisions

To avert unmanageable surges in COVID-19 hospitalizations and to mitigate pandemic mortality, states across the U. S. have implemented stay-at-home (or shelter-in-place) orders to enforce social distancing in March. In May, several states relaxed the restrictions and some businesses could reopen, such as manufactures. To balance the potential overwhelming healthcare surges and the costly lockdowns, governments need to decide when, where, and to which degree to reopen businesses. For example, Michigan published the "Michigan Safe Start Plan to Re-Engage the Economy," and New York published "New York Forward", which contain the metrics to safely reopen.

Dispatch and Delivery - COVID-19 Impact on Food Delivery

Starting from March 2020, the social distancing policy has been issued across the world to prevent the spread of the virus. Specifically, no-contact delivery is required for food and drink delivery businesses, seeing a surge in demand, such as Instacart, in areas with an increasing number of confirmed cases. There are three options for restaurants to implement no-contact delivery, such as signing in food delivery apps, operating their own delivery service, or providing pickup service (Drive-thru).

In this work, we study the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic over the food delivery. Firstly, we build a susceptible infected removed (SIR) model to predict the future infections. Then, we construct a multiple linear regression (MLR) to forecast the restaurants' demand by analyzing the real-time data from the food delivery app and the virus spread data. Finally, from the perspective of restaurants, we compare the costs of two delivery options, operating own delivery service and signing in food delivery apps, through the predicted number of orders and randomly generated demand locations.

Decision Models

Bus Network Redesign and Timetable Optimization

An Interactive Game for Showing Effects of Business Reopen & Closedown Decisions

Dispatch and Delivery - COVID-19 Impact on Food Delivery

Dispatch and Delivery - Lunch Delivery During School Lockdown (IOE 510 Course Projects)

To design routes and time schedules for using multiple vehicles (e.g., school buses) to deliver school lunches to students in under-served communities.