INSIGHT - medIcal oxygen supply chaiN deSIGn and planning for COVID-19 HospiTals

With the evolution of the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic becoming increasingly uncertain and oxygen-therapy being the current dominant treatment of patients, securing resilient and robust operation of medical oxygen supply chains becomes increasingly urgent. INSIGHT will develop a whole-systems analysis on the integrated design and operation of medical oxygen supply chains in the UK for current, future waves of SARS-CoV-2 as well as for other pandemics and cases that require emergency planning. A key uniqueness of INSIGHT is the spatially-explicit and uncertainty-aware modelling of supply chains which will provide a roadmap to region-specific strategies for coping with different realisations of future COVID-19 waves. Our optimisation-based framework for enhanced decision making for emergency planning will be open-source, publicly available and due to the design of INSIGHT could be easily generalised to inform European and low and middle income countries (LMICs) strategies. To this end, we propose to combine methodologies from supply chain optimisation, multi-scale modelling and stochastic optimisation. Through our long-standing collaboration with Linde.plc we have been developing models related to the air separation industry. Finally, we have secured the active participation of BOC, one of the two NHS bulk medical oxygen providers, so as to maximise the impact and applicability of INSIGHT's outcomes.