Online Facility Service Leasing Inspired by the COVID-19 Pandemic

Christine Markarian, Peter Khallouf

2021

Abstract

In response to resource shortages caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, many communities have been leasing health facilities such as hospitals, clinics, and other centers in order to meet the needs of their patients. The goals have been two-folded: leasing costs had to be optimized and patients had to be served as soon as possible. Decisions as to when to lease which services at which facility locations shaped the success of these goals. At the heart of these decisions lies a complex optimization problem, which we call the Online Non-metric Facility Service Leasing problem (non-metric OFSL), a generalization of the well-known Online Non-metric Facility Leasing problem (non-metric OFL) in which facility locations are leased for different facility-time durations. In non-metric OFSL, each facility location may provide a number of services leased for different service-time durations. Additionally, each service is associated with a dormant fee that needs to be paid for each day at which the service is not leased. The optimization goal is to minimize the total leasing costs, dormant fees, and the distances between patients and the facilities they are connected to. We develop the first online algorithm for non-metric OFSL, evaluated using the notion of competitive analysis. The latter is a worst-case analysis used to measure the quality of online algorithms, in which the online algorithm’s output is compared to the optimal offline solution for all instances of the problem.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Markarian C. and Khallouf P. (2021). Online Facility Service Leasing Inspired by the COVID-19 Pandemic. In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics - Volume 1: ICINCO, ISBN 978-989-758-522-7, pages 195-202. DOI: 10.5220/0010572601950202

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icinco21,
author={Christine Markarian and Peter Khallouf},
title={Online Facility Service Leasing Inspired by the COVID-19 Pandemic},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics - Volume 1: ICINCO,},
year={2021},
pages={195-202},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0010572601950202},
isbn={978-989-758-522-7},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics - Volume 1: ICINCO,
TI - Online Facility Service Leasing Inspired by the COVID-19 Pandemic
SN - 978-989-758-522-7
AU - Markarian C.
AU - Khallouf P.
PY - 2021
SP - 195
EP - 202
DO - 10.5220/0010572601950202