A Model for Optimizing the Health and Economic Impacts of Covid-19 under Social Distancing Measures; A Study for the Number of Passengers and their Seating Arrangements in Aircrafts

Covid-19 has had a disastrous economic impact on countries and industries as countries have gone through the lockdown process to reduce the health impact of Covid-19. As countries have begun the reopening phases, businesses have been allowed to have on-site customers but with reduced number of people on their sites to follow the social distancing measures. This has resulted in a big burden on the economic side of these businesses as their number of customers have decreased substantially. In this study we propose a model to minimize the economic impact of Covid-19 for businesses and organizations that have implemented social distancing measures as well as health impact of Covid-19 for their customers and employees. We introduce quantity Spread in which minimizing Spread gives the optimum number and arrangement of people on a given site with a social distancing measure. We apply our model to a real-world case and optimize the number of passengers and their arrangements under a social distancing measure for two different popular aircraft seat layouts using Annealing Monte Carlo technique. We obtain the optimum numbers and optimal arrangements of passengers considering both family groups and individual passengers for the social distancing measure. The obtained optimal arrangements of passengers show complex patterns with groups and individual passengers are mixed in complex and non-trivial ways. This demonstrates the necessity of using our model or its variants to find these optimal arrangements. Moreover, we show that any other arrangements of passengers with the same number of passengers is a suboptimal arrangement with higher health risks as a result of lower distance between passengers. Our model could be implemented to other social setups such as sports events, theaters, medical centers, etc.