The spread of viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 brought new challenges to our society, including a stronger focus on safety across all businesses. Many countries have imposed a minimum social distance among people in order to ensure their safety. This brings new challenges to many customer-related businesses, such as restaurants, offices, theaters, etc., on how to locate their facilities (tables, seats etc.) under distancing constraints. We propose a parallel between this problem and that of locating wind turbines in an offshore area. The discovery of this parallel allows us to apply Mathematical Optimization algorithms originally designed for wind farms, to produce optimized facility layouts that minimize the overall risk of infection among customers. In this way we can investigate the structure of the safest layouts, with some surprising outcomes. A lesson learned is that, in the safest layouts, the facilities are not equally distanced (as it is typically believed) but tend to concentrate on the border of the available area—a policy that significantly reduces the overall risk of contagion.

SARS-CoV-2 等病毒的传播给我们的社会带来了新的挑战，包括更加关注所有企业的安全。许多国家都规定了人与人之间的最低社会距离，以确保他们的安全。这给餐厅、办公室、剧院等许多与客户相关的业务带来了新的挑战，即如何在距离限制下定位他们的设施（桌子、座位等）。我们建议将此问题与在近海区域定位风力涡轮机的问题进行比较。这种并行的发现使我们能够应用最初为风电场设计的数学优化算法，以生成优化的设施布局，从而最大限度地降低客户感染的总体风险。通过这种方式，我们可以研究最安全布局的结构，并获得一些令人惊讶的结果。