The world is now faced with the COVID-19 pandemic, a healthcare disaster, not limited to time or location. The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the importance of operations research and related analytical tools, with the research and practitioner communities channeling and harnessing their expertise. It has inspired associated investigations and modeling and methodological advances in order to support deeper insights and enhanced decision-making as well as the provision of guidance to policymakers. In this tutorial, I overview some of the novel advances and applications, inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic, utilizing game theory. The focus of the tutorial is on supply chain networks, although the scope is broader. The tutorial first presents an overview of variational inequality theory, which is the methodology utilized for the formulation, qualitative analysis, and solution of the described models. The supply chain network models presented are recently introduced ones that capture, respectively: the inclusion of labor into supply chain networks, enabling the quantitative assessment of disruptions to labor; the fierce competition among entities for medical supplies in the pandemic from PPEs to, now, vaccines; and, finally, the calculation of the potential synergy associated with the teaming, that is, the cooperation, among organizations in the pandemic, under cost and demand uncertainty, to provide needed supplies. Suggestions for future research are provided.
Author: Anna Nagurney