A multi-objective mathematical programming model for location-routing of COVID-19 healthcare waste in Tunisia

The fast transmission of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome CoronaVirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has led to a pandemic of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) through the world. The spread of this virus is continuing to generate a universal health crisis that led to severe impacts on all people across the world. This disease has resulted in an enormous number of infected cases that must be hospitalized. The exponential increase in the number of tested positive patients systematically leads to an exponential generation of healthcare wastes. Indeed, healthcare waste management is a challenge task for the municipal authorities and healthcare providers since inadequate management policies can lead to serious problems for both human health and environment. In this context, in order to face the third wave pandemic pick, we propose in this paper a multi-objective mixed integer mathematical program to expend the capacity of medical waste facilities by locating temporary treatment centers as well as temporary landfills. In addition, the proposed model allows optimizing COVID-19 medical waste routing from hospitals to disposal centers. The location-routing suggested model aims at minimizing the risk of virus transmission as well as total costs and is applied on a real case study based on the COVID-19 outbreak in Tunisia.