An Update on Our Supply Chain Research with the Inclusion of Labor in the COVID-19 Pandemic

In less than two weeks,  on March 11, 2021, we will be marking the first "anniversary" of the World Health Organization declaring the COVID-19 pandemic. It has been a year like no other in our lifetimes.

It has also been a year in which many researchers and practitioners have tried to do their best in addressing many of the complex problems that have resulted, as a consequence of the pandemic. What has especially resonated with me has been the criticality of numerous supply chains from PPE and medical supply ones (and now even those associated with vaccines) to food. The shortcomings associated with such supply chains have included the fact that labor has been very seriously impacted in the pandemic with many falling ill, some succumbing to the disease, and others working in quite challenging circumstances with added stressors and anxiety, as well as new procedures, in terms of social distancing requirements, for example.

The importance of people in supply chains, including healthcare ones, has, hence, stood out. However, there was not much scientific literature that addresses disruptions on labor and impacts on supply chains. So, as a researcher and educator,  I decided to delve deeper into constructing mathematical models, both optimization and game theory ones, that would shed light on labor availability, losses in productivity, and related issues.

I am pleased to say that a series of my papers on this topic has now been accepted for publication, the first of which, was on food. The paper, "Perishable Food Supply Chain Networks with Labor in the Covid-19 Pandemic," is now in press in the refereed, edited volume: Dynamics of Disasters - Impact, Risk, Resilience, and Solutions,  I.S. Kotsireas, A. Nagurney, P.M. Pardalos, and A. Tsokas, Editors, Springer International Publishing Switzerland, 2021.

This paper explicitly captures the perishability of food from points of production to points of demand. The firm is considered to be a profit-maximizer and also encumbers costs associated with paying for labor. Each link in the supply chain network has a bound on the labor availability and also a productivity factor associated with labor. The demands for the food items are assumed to be elastic.

In the second paper in the series, "Optimization of Supply Chain Networks with Inclusion of Labor: Applications to COVID-19 Pandemic, now in press in The International Journal of Production Economics, I turn to expanding the ideas in the first paper, with a focus on healthcare products, and with consideration of 3 different sets of constraints on labor, under, first elastic demand, and then, under fixed demands. The latter is important since in the case of certain products, especially healthcare ones, demand may be inelastic when it comes to price.

And, in the third paper in this series, "Supply Chain Game Theory Network Modeling Under Labor Constraints: Applications to the Covid-19 Pandemic," I utilize game theory to consider three different sets of constraints in a supply chain network model consisting of multiple competing firms. The paper is now available online in the European Journal of Operational Research. Therein, I also capture three sets of constraints for labor but, now, in the case of two of the sets, the firms compete for labor. In this work, the first model is a Nash Equilibrium one, whereas the other two are Generalized Nash Equilibrium models.

The above work integrates economics and operations research and the underlying methodological formalism is that of the theory of variational inequalities.

This series of papers further inspired me to write an article for The Conversation, entitled: "Vaccine delays reveal unexpected weak link in supply chains: A shortage of workers."

I was honored to be, subsequently, invited to write a follow-up article, "In the End, It's All About People," by Kara Tucker, the new Editor of the INFORMS publication, ORMS Today. 

And, if you would like to learn more, please, feel free to listen to the INFORMS podcast: "Shining a light on the COVID-19 vaccine distribution," in which I am interviewed by Ashley Kilgore.

The three papers of mine, highlighted above, are all dedicated to essential workers! We are so grateful for their contributions in the past; in the pandemic, and wish them the very best in the future!

Optimism and Operations Research

Today I received info on a very interesting article sent via The Harvard Gazette e-list that spoke about optimism. I was a 2005-2006 Science Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, so I receive such mailings and enjoy such articles very much.

But, of course, you may be wondering how relevant is optimism in the pandemic? I suggest that you read the above article and I will share some highlights from my great professional discipline of Operations Research (OR) that makes me quite optimistic!

First, I must say that Operations Research, with its scientific, very powerful methodologies, and wide range of applications, coupled with the expertise of those in our profession, has never been more relevant than in the COVID-19 pandemic. The positive impact has been global, with many of our academic researchers and practitioners speaking to the media, writing OpEds, and, of course, journal articles, and also fostering education about numerous relevant issues from healthcare to vaccine supply chains. INFORMS, a professional society of over 11,000 members, for example, has compiled a wealth of resources along these lines, very accessible to the public as well as to policy and decision-makers.

Others have been advising governments and I have a special shout out to my great Operations Research colleagues in the UK on this!

Of course, the pandemic has caused incredible pain and suffering throughout the globe, but support and advocacy by professional societies such as INFORMS is helping in getting important news out. My "last" face to face conference before the declaration by the WHO of the pandemic on March 11, 2020, was the inaugural INFORMS Security Conference in Monterey, California in mid February 2020. Often I return to the wonderful memories and many of those are because of the  pleasant exchanges of colleagues at that conference, which I had blogged about. And, speaking of conferences, I was very touched by the essay, "Thanks for the Memories," by Peter Horner, who has served for 30 years as the Editor of ORMS Today! There is a photo therein of Peter with Harrison Schramm, who, coincidentally, was an organizer of the conference in Monterey (and appears with me in a photo in my blogpost, along with Professor Stefan Pickl of Germany). Luckily, Peter will continue as Editor of the Analytics online magazine of INFORMS.

Now, more on optimism. I would like to single out and applaud the efforts of AIRO Young, which is  a group of young researchers, part of the Italian Operational Research Society. Their energy, enthusiasm, and initiatives are all cause for optimism!

For example, in the relatively new journal, SN Operations Research Forum, published by Springer, there is the article, Women Just Wanna Have OR: Young Researchers Interview Expert Researchers, co-authored by Amorosi, Cavagnini, Del Sasso, Fischetti, Morandi, and Raffaele (all members of AIRO Young),  which is quite inspiring. Although so much remains to be done, much has been accomplished and I was so honored to be interviewed for this article, along with amazing colleagues: Professors Carvalho, Romero Morales, Ljubic, Labbe, and Speranza, speaking from many different countries about their experiences and offering many pearls of wisdom.

Also, Alice Raffaele,  in her very eloquent, literary article: Becoming Visible: Why We Should be Better Communicators Now has excellent suggestions for our professional community, further generating optimism. 

Thanks to SN Operations Research Forum for making the above (and other) articles available for everyone to read online!

I would also like to thank the amazing students who are behind the publication ORMS Tomorrow, supported by INFORMS. Two of my former PhD students, now Professors, Dr. Pritha Duttaof Pace University in NYC and Dr. Shivani Shukla of the University of San Francisco, worked on this publication when they were students at the Isenberg School.

Beginning My 13th Year of Blogging

Hard to believe that not only is the horrific 2020 year behind us, but that this month marks the beginning of my 13th year of blogging! Interestingly, I went back to my very first blogpost, which was on the new US administration in 2009 and the election of President Barack Obama. In the post, I also noted a Letter to the Editor that I had had published in The New York Times, which spoke about how much I enjoyed teaching my Transportation and Logistics class. And I taught this class, albeit remotely, this past Fall because of the pandemic. Now, once again, we have a new incoming administration, to be led by President-elect Joe Biden, and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, on the horizon!

2020 has been a remarkable year in human history and there is now hope because of the Covid-19 vaccines. It was a year in which so many in our profession pivoted to inform the public through their writings, virtual speaking engagements, and many interviews with the media. I learnt so much from speaking to many journalists from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Chicago Tribune, and The Boston Globe, as well as numerous other publications, including industry-based ones. It was a pleasure to be on NBC News in Boston and in Dallas and to also be on many radio programs, including NPR and Marketplace (and, remarkably, quite a few of the holiday cards that we received noted that I had been heard by friends and relatives from near and far)! I so much enjoyed the intellectual exchanges with journalists that I wrote a tribute to them in a recent blogpost. One journalist thanked me for my blog and reached out to me because of my writings. In addition, during this pandemic I managed to write three articles in The Conversation on the impacts of the pandemic on blood supply chains; game theory and competition for medical supplies (and now relevant to vaccines), plus the vaccine cold chain. These articles generated a great deal of interest and I was honored to be written up by the Isenberg School of Management and the University of Massachusetts Amherst in its 2020 Report on Research with the photo below on the back cover of this report.

With all the disruptions and pain and suffering caused by the pandemic, I am thankful that we managed to continue our research at the Supernetwork Center, with several articles of relevance to supply chains in the pandemic written. Also, our newest Dynamics of Disasters volume, will be published soon by Springer.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank professional societies, including INFORMS, for the support during the pandemic and for nurturing professional exchanges and community. I look forward to the time; hopefully, before too long, when we can again meet face to face at conferences and other venues. In the meantime, best wishes for this New 2021 Year!

50 Years of the Great Journal Networks and a Video

 In 2021, we are marking the 50th anniversary of the great journal - Networks, which is truly a landmark anniversary! In order to celebrate this anniversary appropriately, the Co-Editors Bruce Golden and Doug Shier took the great initiative of editing a special issue of the journal, in Parts 1 and 2.

I am thrilled and absolutely delighted that Part 1 has now been published and is the first issue of the January 2021 volume.  In it, I am greatly honored to have my paper, which was written following an invitation from the Co-Editors that I could not refuse.

My paper, "Networks in economics and finance in Networks and beyond: A half century retrospective," traces and synthesizes the significant contributions to this area in papers published in this journal and in other journals and books. Yes, I pored through all the papers in the journal since its inception and to emphasize the "beyond" part - I went as far back as 1758! It was also important to incorporate relevant more recent contributions from the Network Science community.

A preprint of my paper can be downloaded here. 

Also, the Co-Editors organizes a special session at the recent INFORMS Annual Meeting this year, which was virtual because of the pandemic and several of the contributors to the special volume spoke.

Below is a photo of us!

The slide deck of my INFORMS presentation can be downloaded here.

The video of my presentation can be viewed here.

Congratulations to Networks on its 50th Anniversary and thanks to all the Editors over the years and to the authors as well as to the reviewers of many articles! Wishing the journal and researchers on networks many more successful years and research discoveries!

Once Part 2 of the special issue of Networks dedicated to the 50th Anniversary is posted online by the publisher Wiley, I will be providing a link to it on this blogpost.

Thanking Outstanding Journalists in the Pandemic

In the pandemic, a positive feature has been the number of excellent journalists that I have had the pleasure to interact with through interviews. The writings of journalists and their investigative journalism have kept us informed as new information becomes available at, sometimes, an incredibly rapid pace. Journalists are challenged now for so many reasons, including their personal safety and I thank them for their work ethic, their outreach, and their attention to digging deep. 

Honestly, one of the highlights in this pandemic is the numerous conversations that I have had with journalists, some lasting for an hour or more. I have also very much enjoyed being interviewed for several radio programs, both in the US and in England, and have enjoyed being on TV news programs in Boston and in Dallas. The intelligence of the journalists and their thoughtful questions keep this academic intellectually engaged on many dimensions. Sometimes the interviews even end with laughter and it is clear that a real connection has been made. Also, as an educator, I believe that we can play an important role, especially if our expertise is relevant, to helping journalists and the media, in general, get the important news out in the pandemic, whether it involves, for example, product shortages due to supply chain disruptions, challenges associated with the cold chains needed for the Covid-19 vaccines, and many logistical issues surrounding the distribution of the vaccines, as well as technological innovations in the vaccine cold chain.  Recently, the professional society of INFORMS, which has over 11,000 members had its virtual conference, and I was interviewed by Glenn Wegryn on my experiences with the media in the pandemic. You can view it on youtube.

In my previous blogpost, I wrote about the vaccine cold chain and noted several informative articles, including the fascinating one by Lori Hinnant in the Associated Press on challenges of the vaccine cold chain in developing countries and even the CareTalk podcast that I was honored to be a guest on.

When responding to inquiries from journalists and the media, one has to be ready, since often (but not always), they are on a tight timeline (and this is especially evident in the pandemic). I have received quite a few messages from journalists in my email marked URGENT in the subject line.

A while back I was interviewed by Charlie Slack, for the excellent article, "The pandemic offers valuable lessons that can help you compete in the months and years ahead," for the Bank of America, which is part of a series. I also thoroughly enjoyed speaking with Jeff Reinke for his article published on manufacturing.net (which has been reprinted on other outlets), "Vaccine poses immense, unprecedented distribution challenges." Jeff's knowledge of logistics is vast - honestly, I could have spoken with him for hours!

I also very much enjoyed speaking with Michael Goldstein for his superb article in Forbes, "Covid-19 vaccines are here: Are airlines ready to transport them" which presciently anticipated the big news today about Pfizer's vaccine being air shipped from Belgium to the US yesterday via United cargo!

And, I hope that all of you who celebrated Thanksgiving had a pleasant, festive day! Just before the holiday I was contacted again by a Senior Technical Writer for USA Today, Jessica Guynn, who had interviewed me a few months ago, and her latest article on product shortages, including that of, yes, here we go again, toilet paper (if you read it to the end it may make you smile). I was laughing out loud, having been reminded of summers spent at scouting camps; sleeping in a tent, and having access to very limited shower (cold water only) and bathroom facilities (outhouses).

It was a pleasure to speak with Karen Pallarito, whose article, "This is why the COVID-19 vaccine is going to take longer than you think," published on Livestrong.com.

I would also like to thank Kim Severson, a journalist for The New York Times, who had interviewed me for an article on food, "7 ways the pandemic has changed the way that we shop for food," that was published in early September. The article was very well researched and insightful. It was special to speak with Katie Surma of The Chicago Tribune for her article, "Chicago-area grocers stock up as COVID-19 cases rise.

And, as for technological innovations, Jared S. Hopkins of The Wall Street Journal, who has been writing very timely articles on the vaccine rollout, interviewed me for an article on new vials developed by Corning, that can enhance the storage and transport of the Covid-19 vaccines.

I had mentioned earlier in this blogpost that one had to be ready to respond to media inquiries. For example, I was contacted by BBC radio recently in the early afternoon for a live segment for the Colin Murray show, which took place at 5:30ET (but 10:30PM UK time).  Since I had been a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College at the University of Oxford in England, I am quite good at parsing different British accents and our conversation, I believe, was terrific.

I would also like to single out and thank Larry Collins, another award-winning journalist with whom I have had the pleasure and honor of speaking in the pandemic for the news segment, "COVID-19 vaccine distribution, shipping present challenges." The TV news segment from Dallas can be accessed here. Larry is a fabulous interviewer!

It is important to add that not every interview that one might do results in quotes. Nevertheless, I have gotten thanks from two journalists for educating them and several have told me that they wish that they had majored in operations and logistics and college, so I consider this a success.

And for those of you who are interested in reading and learning more,  INFORMS maintains regular updates on its members on its website, who have appeared in the media, and who have been interviewed on various pandemic topics, including healthcare and supply chains. This is an excellent, very valuable service.

The Covid-19 Vaccine Cold Chain

On September 18, 2020 my article, "Keeping coronavirus vaccines at subzero temperatures during distribution will be hard, but likely key to ending pandemic," was published in The Conversation. I believed that it was imperative (and my Editors at The Conversation agreed) to start speaking to a broad audience on the necessity and importance of the cold chain to the effective distribution of the Covid-19 vaccines that are presently under development by major pharmaceutical firms.  There was much discussion and coverage in the press about the manufacturing aspects of the different vaccines as well as the R&D involved. However, there was very little being discussed about the distribution issues.  It was imperative to me  that emphasis (and associated challenges) on getting the approved vaccines ultimately from point A (manufacturing) to point B (point of administering of the vaccine), with the quality preserved in the transportation and distribution process, be brought to everyone's attention.

I have conducted research on perishable product supply chains from food to pharmaceuticals and even co-authored a book on the topic.

There are now 4 major Covid-19 vaccines that are far along in the trial phases and this is quite promising, with the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines requiring storage below freezing (Pfizer's to the extreme temp of -94 F) with those of Astrazeneca's and John & Johnson's needing to be in the range of 2-8 degrees C, which is standard for many vaccines. 

I have published multiple articles in The Conversation, but this one generated the greatest number of comments and even emails to me from around the globe, which continue. Clearly, the article that I wrote had touched on a very important issue, and I am also grateful that the article got reprinted in multiple media outlets.

Since the publication of my article, much has happened, and the momentum keeps on growing.

I had the pleasure of being interviewed by David Williams and John Driscoll for their Care Talk podcast, the link to which is below. 

 

Lori Hinnant, who is an Associated Press journalist, based in Paris, subsequently interviewed me for a fabulous article, "Vaccine storage issues could leave 3B without access."  My colleague at the Carey School of Business at Johns Hopkins, Tinglong Dai, was also interviewed for this article, which has been reprinted internationally in numerous outlets and also published in The Washington Post and ABCNews.

I have had additional interviews with journalists at The Wall Street Journal and am quoted in the article, "Covid-19 vaccines to be stored secretly under tight security," by Jared S. Hopkins on the security of the distribution of the vaccine. There is a slightly modified title in the hard copy version - a colleague kindly delivered his copy to my door!

I've done research with collaborators on freight security of highly value cargo and clearly the Covid-19 vaccines fall into this category!

And, on November 6, I will be featured on the NPR show The Pulse, based on an interview on the vaccine cold chain conducted by Alan Yu.

One of the goals of my Conversation article was to make the cold chain distribution issues more visible in order that appropriate preparedness measures would be taken, both nationally and globally, so that, once vaccines are approved, time is not wasted and the vaccines do not go to waste as well.

Many thanks to all those who have responded, including the amazing journalists, who continue to keep this important topic in the news!

And, just before publishing this blogpost, I received another inquiry from a journalist requesting an interview because of my article in The Conversation!

Thanks to the USC Center for Artificial Intelligence in Society!

This past Wednesday, I had the pleasure of being the first speaker in the virtual seminar series organized by the University of Southern California's Center for Artificial Intelligence in Society (CAIS).  The title of my presentation was, "Game Theory Network Models for Disaster Relief," and my host was Professor Phebe Vayanos!

The talk was well advertised and it was a pleasure and delight to have participants viewing my presentation even from Mexico and India! It was very thoughtful for CAIS to open up the virtual seminar to the public. Terrific that also students and colleagues from UMass Amherst could view it.

The organizers of this series have posted the video recording on youtube, so that additional folks that are interested can see it:

Dr. Vayanos did a great job moderating the Q&A component of the seminar after my presentation. The questions and discussions were terrific! The slide deck of this talk has been posted on the Virtual Center for Supernetworks website at the Isenberg School of Management. 

And, luckily, we managed to conduct this event when we did, since two hours afterwards, we lost electric power due to a fierce windstorm that struck Massachusetts. We were without electric power and, hence, without Wi Fi, for 30 hours, signifying further the importance of research and practice surrounding all phases of disaster management, from preparedness and mitigation to response and recovery. Some of our neighbors are still without power and a neighbor was trapped in his car for 4 hours with trees and downed power lines in front and behind his vehicle. And, yesterday morning, we saw the Town of Amherst crew taking down with great skill an ailing tree so that it, too, would not fall and disrupt electricity and communications!