Publication Details

Category Text Publication
Reference Category Journals
DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0285601
Licence creative commons licence
Title (Primary) On the optimal presence strategies for workplace during pandemics: A COVID-19 inspired probabilistic model
Author Davoodi, M.; Senapati, A.; Mertel, A.; Schlechte-Welnicz, W.; Calabrese, J.M.
Source Titel PLOS ONE
Year 2023
Department OESA
Volume 18
Issue 5
Page From e0285601
Language englisch
Topic T5 Future Landscapes
Supplements https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0285601.s001
Abstract During pandemics like COVID-19, both the quality and quantity of services offered by businesses and organizations have been severely impacted. They often have applied a hybrid home office setup to overcome this problem, although in some situations, working from home lowers employee productivity. So, increasing the rate of presence in the office is frequently desired from the manager’s standpoint. On the other hand, as the virus spreads through interpersonal contact, the risk of infection increases when workplace occupancy rises. Motivated by this trade-off, in this paper, we model this problem as a bi-objective optimization problem and propose a practical approach to find the trade-off solutions. We present a new probabilistic framework to compute the expected number of infected employees for a setting of the influential parameters, such as the incidence level in the neighborhood of the company, transmission rate of the virus, number of employees, rate of vaccination, testing frequency, and rate of contacts among the employees. The results show a wide range of trade-offs between the expected number of infections and productivity, for example, from 1 to 6 weekly infections in 100 employees and a productivity level of 65% to 85%. This depends on the configuration of influential parameters and the occupancy level. We implement the model and the algorithm and perform several experiments with different settings of the parameters. Moreover, we developed an online application based on the result in this paper which can be used as a recommender for the optimal rate of occupancy in companies/workplaces.
Persistent UFZ Identifier https://www.ufz.de/index.php?en=20939&ufzPublicationIdentifier=27039
Davoodi, M., Senapati, A., Mertel, A., Schlechte-Welnicz, W., Calabrese, J.M. (2023):
On the optimal presence strategies for workplace during pandemics: A COVID-19 inspired probabilistic model
PLOS One 18 (5), e0285601 10.1371/journal.pone.0285601