Heuristic algorithm tool for planning mass vaccine campaigns

What is it about?

The planning of massive vaccination campaigns often falls to non-governmental organizations that have to face the critical challenge of vaccinating the largest number of people in the shortest time. This work aims to minimize the duration of mass vaccination campaigns in rural and remote areas of developing countries. This paper presents a linear mathematical model that combines location, scheduling, and routing decisions that allows determining where to locate the vaccination centers, as well as the schedule/route that each medical team must follow to meet the target demand in the shortest time possible. The paper also describes the heuristics implemented in an Excel spreadsheet environment in order to provide a simple and efficient tool to help decision makers. Numerical results are presented showing the good performance of the heuristic.

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