Developing a VRP-based GIS Model for Passengers' Quarantine Accommodation

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically impacted people's travel and movement worldwide. Infectious diseases like COVID-19 have spread widely across the population, causing a rapid increase in daily cases. Thus, governments cannot risk expanding this number. Therefore, many countries introduced emergency legislation to minimize the effect of new arrivals on the Covid-19 spread. Preventive procedures include PCR tests, fever checking, sanitization, social distancing, and quarantining people entering the country for 14 days (the virus's incubation period) to guarantee they are not infected. This study proposes a Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP)-based GIS optimization model for passengers' hotel allocation to minimize waiting time on borders and increase Hotels' Utilization. VRP methodology is used to choose vehicle routes that transport passengers from airports who travel between hotels, optimizing the traveling time between airports and hotels. Moreover, the efficiency of this process will be enhanced by minimizing waiting time at the airport. Finally, a parameter variation experiment was conducted to determine the optimal number of buses, which reduces the time passengers wait at the airport. Experimental results show that the proposed model put forward effective strategies for the optimal allocation of passengers. Besides 34 hotels in Jordan, distances between airports and hotels, number of passengers, and bed capacity per hotel emerge as important determinants.