EURO 2024 Copenhagen
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2335. Operationalising Policy: Distributing Vaccines in a Pandemic/Epidemic

Invited abstract in session WB-21: Infectious diseases and pandemics, stream OR in Humanitarian Operations (HOpe).

Wednesday, 10:30-12:00
Room: 49 (building: 116)

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Foteini Stavropoulou
Liverpool Business School, Liverpool John Moores University
2. Sarah Schiffling
HUMLOG Institute, Hanken School of Economics
3. Liz Breen
School of Pharmacy and Medical Sciences, University of Bradford

Abstract

In the response to the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccine distribution was initially characterised by scarcity with limited production capacity and high demand. While policy decisions to prioritise certain patient groups over others have been widely discussed, this paper focuses on providing a user-friendly and adaptable approach to align vaccine allocation decisions and distribution plans with the government-imposed prioritisation policies. We introduce the Vaccine Distribution Problem, and we propose four mathematical formulations relating to the Vehicle Routing Problem with profits, a concept that has not been adopted within humanitarian or healthcare supply chain applications. This problem aims to allocate the available vaccine supplies to a set of predefined vaccination sites fairly, following a given prioritization policy, while designing the corresponding set of vehicle routes that maximize the total collected profit. We incorporate split deliveries and incomplete service as well as a profit adjustment mechanism to ensure fairness in the vaccine allocation decisions and maximise resources utilisation. To validate and evaluate our approach, we created a real-world case study based on Liverpool, an English city that was affected severely by COVID-19, using only publicly available data.

Keywords

Status: accepted


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