A Model for Supply-Chain Decisions for Resource Sharing with an Application to Ventilator Allocation to Combat COVID-19

Sanjay Mehrotra; Hamed Rahimian; Masoud Barah; Fengqiao Luo; Karolina Schantz

Estimates for the initial inventory of ventilators at different states were obtained from [2] . These estimates are based on a hospital survey [24, 6] . The estimates for new ventilator production were obtained based on information provided at the US presidential briefings on 03/27/20 [7] . These estimates suggest that the normal yearly ventilator production capacity is about 30,000 ventilators/year. However, under the US Defense Production Act, with the participation of additional companies, production of approximately 10,000 ventilators/month could be possible [7] . Using this information, for the baseline case we assumed that the current daily ventilator production rate is Q t = 80 ventilators/day; and it will be increased to Q t = 320 ventilators/day starting on 04/15/2020. We refer to this case, as "baseline production", and analyzed in Section 4.5.1. We also analyze the case that the ramp-up in production happens on 04/01/2020 or 04/07/2020 in Section 4.5.2.