Optimizing vaccine distribution networks in low and middle-income countries
This addresses vaccine access issues for children in low and middle-income countries, representing an incremental improvement in optimization methods for distribution networks.
The paper tackled the problem of designing vaccine distribution networks for WHO-EPI in low and middle-income countries by formulating it as a mixed integer program and developing a new algorithm to handle large-scale instances, showing it obtains high-quality solutions within minutes for data from four sub-Saharan African countries.
Vaccination has been proven to be the most effective method to prevent infectious diseases. However, there are still millions of children in low and middle-income countries who are not covered by routine vaccines and remain at risk. The World Health Organization - Expanded Programme on Immunization (WHO-EPI) was designed to provide universal childhood vaccine access for children across the world and in this work, we address the design of the distribution network for WHO-EPI vaccines. In particular, we formulate the network design problem as a mixed integer program (MIP) and present a new algorithm for typical problems that are too large to be solved using commercial MIP software. We test the algorithm using data derived from four different countries in sub-Saharan Africa and show that the algorithm is able to obtain high-quality solutions for even the largest problems within a few minutes.