Manufacturing Security Strategies for Personal Protective Equipment in Response to the COVID-19 Crisis: A Regional Emergency Manufacturing Consortium Design Based on Government Regulation

Abstract

The outbreak of COVID-19 poses a great threat to human life. In the early days of the COVID-19outbreak, lockdown, quarantine, movement restrictions and personal protection became the main preventive measures, which caused a surge in demand for personal protective equipment (PPE). The PPE supply chain was disrupted by COVID-19, which resulted in a shortage of upstream raw materials, a lack of midstream manufacturing capacity and excessive downstream demand fluctuations. The panic buying and shortage of PPE have thrown the community into panic. In this context, the rapid restoration or construction of PPE manufacturing supply chain has become the main strategy to solve the COVID-19 crisis. Therefore, it is imperative to quickly restore or build new manufacturing supply chains of epidemic prevention supplies. In view of this, this research first proposes taking administrative regions as the basic unit, focusing on the manufacturing of epidemic prevention supplies in the supply chain, and using the mixed-integer optimization method to select partners with the the objectives of shortest manufacturing time, the highest reliability and the greatest core competitiveness, and establish for the first time a government-led system model of a regional emergency manufacturing consortium for epidemic prevention supplies, aiming to increase the regional PPE supply assurance capacity. Finally, the validity of the proposed model is demonstrated through case studies. The widespread adoption of this system model will not only solve the current crisis of short-supply of epidemic prevention supplies, but also make an important contribution to the scientific decision-making of the government in the event of similar crises in the future, which is a concrete manifestation of the overall national security.