The insurgence of the COVID pandemic calls for mass vaccination campaigns worldwide. Pharmaceutical companies struggle to ramp up their production to meet the demand for vaccines but cannot always guarantee a perfectly regular delivery schedule. On the other hand, governments must devise plans to have most of their population vaccinated in the shortest possible time and have the vaccine booster administered after a precise time interval. The combination of delivery uncertainties and those time requirements may make such planning difficult. In this paper, we propose several heuristic strategies to meet those requirements in the face of delivery uncertainties. The outcome of those strategies is a daily vaccination plan that suggests how many initial doses and boosters can be administered each day. We compare the results with the optimal plan obtained through linear programming, which however assumes that we know in advance the whole delivery schedule. As for performance metrics, we consider both the vaccination time (which has to be as low as possible) and the balance between vaccination capacities over time (which has to be as uniform as possible). The strategies achieving the best trade-off between those competing requirements turn out to be the q-days ahead strategies, which put aside doses to guarantee that we do not run out of stock on just the next q days. Increasing the look-ahead period, i.e. q, allows to achieve a lower number of out-of-stock days, though worsening the other performance indicators.
Foderaro, S., Naldi, M., Nicosia, G., Pacifici, A. (2022). Planning a Mass Vaccination Campaign with Balanced Staff Engagement. In W.C. E. Ziemba (a cura di), Information Technology for Management: Business and Social Issues (pp. 97-116). Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH [10.1007/978-3-030-98997-2_5].
Planning a Mass Vaccination Campaign with Balanced Staff Engagement
Nicosia G.;Pacifici A.
2022-01-01
Abstract
The insurgence of the COVID pandemic calls for mass vaccination campaigns worldwide. Pharmaceutical companies struggle to ramp up their production to meet the demand for vaccines but cannot always guarantee a perfectly regular delivery schedule. On the other hand, governments must devise plans to have most of their population vaccinated in the shortest possible time and have the vaccine booster administered after a precise time interval. The combination of delivery uncertainties and those time requirements may make such planning difficult. In this paper, we propose several heuristic strategies to meet those requirements in the face of delivery uncertainties. The outcome of those strategies is a daily vaccination plan that suggests how many initial doses and boosters can be administered each day. We compare the results with the optimal plan obtained through linear programming, which however assumes that we know in advance the whole delivery schedule. As for performance metrics, we consider both the vaccination time (which has to be as low as possible) and the balance between vaccination capacities over time (which has to be as uniform as possible). The strategies achieving the best trade-off between those competing requirements turn out to be the q-days ahead strategies, which put aside doses to guarantee that we do not run out of stock on just the next q days. Increasing the look-ahead period, i.e. q, allows to achieve a lower number of out-of-stock days, though worsening the other performance indicators.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
