Supply Chain Management

Deadline 12/19/2020

In the past several months, the world has changed in profound and possibly irreversible way due to COVID-19 pandemic. The vaccine development time was shrunk from several years to several months – a commendable effort by governments and scientific communities around the world. Nevertheless, manufacturing and distributing a vaccine that requires a cold supply chain to counties all over the world is a huge supply chain challenge.

In this assignment, review first this blog article as a starting point to understand some of these supply chain challenges and to address the following requirements.

Requirements

1. Conduct a review of at least five research articles that have introduced mathematical models and/or optimization algorithms to address the problem of distributing the vaccine while satisfying all the necessary constraints. Cite these articles in your submission and list at the end the references (Authors, Title, journal or source, date, etc)

2. Summarize what the article contribution is in optimizing the distribution and inventory of the vaccine. For each article, provide a concise summary of its contribution and include describe the objective, constraint and scope they covered.

3. Since COVID-19 is recent, you may not find too many mathematical models or optimization algorithms out already; in which case, you can provide a summary of the same problem for other vaccines such as H1N1 or flu vaccines.

4. Your submission should be between 5 to 10 pages, and most important is to specifically discuss supply chain mathematical or optimization models for distributing, storing, and administering the vaccine. For example, there are many papers and models on forecasting the spread of the virus. This is NOT what I am looking for. I am specifically interested in having us learn how the logistics of the vaccine supply chain will be handled by models that have been introduced or formulated which can be implement in a computer modeling language to optimize the process of vaccine distribution.

5. Submission outside of the scope and those that do not meet the these requirements will not be given partial credit

6. Please do not copy and paste content from the internet. You need to browse research articles and provide short and concise summaries that explain the contribution of such papers in a paragraph or two per each article.

Helpful Resources: Google scholar and ODU library. You can search for articles on Google scholar and those that cannot be accessed fully, you can find them at ODU library