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Fair Multi-Dose Multi-Vaccine Distribution with Uncertain Demand

Asad Araghi, Alireza | 2022

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  1. Type of Document: M.Sc. Thesis
  2. Language: English
  3. Document No: 55565 (51)
  4. University: Sharif University of Technology, International Campus, Kish Island
  5. Department: Science and Engineering
  6. Advisor(s): Haji, Alireza; Fatahi Valilai, Omid
  7. Abstract:
  8. Among disasters, outbreaks of pandemics account for excessive human and material damages,including a significant number of deaths. During any pandemic and once an or a set of effective vaccines have been identified/produced, governments all around the world enter a crucial phase when a crucial demand for an effective global vaccination campaign arises to vaccinate the population to stop/avoid the disease, knowing that the vaccines are not immediately available and may even become available with considerable delays (i.e., delivery and validation delays). Therefore, such phase of a pandemic is very crucial to identify and produce effective vaccines as well as to globally and equitably vaccinate the people while considering all probable delays (i.e., delivery and validation delays of vaccines).Increasing the production and identification of tens of effective vaccines are the essentials to encounter this phase of a pandemic. However, any success in this phase highly depends on developing efficient logistics networks considering all economic (e.g., logistics and health costs) and human (i.e., policy makers, health workers, and people) factors and requires taking detailed operational actions to distribute vaccines among the population by an effective vaccination campaign. The success of such logistics network might however be jeopardized or neutralized due to several factors including the emergence of new variants of the virus, non-compliance with health protocols by the population, insufficient infrastructure and production capacity of medical equipment, monopolies in the distribution and consumption of vaccines by developed countries, regional immigrations on vacation seasons, etc.Hence, providing a precise prediction of the pandemic’s progression allows a better estimation of the demand for medical/health resources as well as for the vaccines. With such a precise estimation, there is a hope to absorb the fluctuation of the demands in the vaccination phase. As a result, the vaccines become immediately available for the whole population and particularly for those regions which are more exposed to infections and it brakes the progression of the pandemic. Accordingly, the main objective of this project is to develop an optimization framework in term of a mixed-integer linear programming model that develops a logistics network to establish an efficient vaccination campaign to control the pandemic through a SVIR model. The network is single-dose, multi-vaccine with uncertain demand. Python and Gurobi have been utilized for calculation. Findings are shown for four different age groups in various time periods. Finally, it has been concluded that increasing the number of vaccine doses and reducing interactions and transmission rates can be effective in reducing new infections. Also, vaccination with higher immunity can significantly reduce the number of cumulative new infections.
  9. Keywords:
  10. Supply Chain ; Vaccine ; Uncertain Demand ; Pandemic ; Logistic Network Design ; Epidemic ; Vaccination

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