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Planning a Mass Vaccination Campaign with Balanced Staff Engagement

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Information Technology for Management: Business and Social Issues (FedCSIS-AIST 2021, ISM 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 442))

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.

This work is partially supported by MIUR PRIN Project AHeAD (Efficient Algorithms for HArnessing Networked Data).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    It is to be noted that this paper deals with the case where a single booster (i.e., second dose) is administered during the planning horizon. Still, the approach can easily include the possibility of further boosters (e.g., third and fourth dose), which are under discussion these days.

  2. 2.

    This objective is pursued together with the constraint that all (or the largest possible part of) the supplied doses have to be used. Without such a constraint, an obvious optimal solution would be not to administer any vaccine.

  3. 3.

    The actual daily shipments to Italy can be observed in the datasets provided at https://github.com/italia/covid19-opendata-vaccini under an OpenData agreement.

  4. 4.

    While we showed that single-dose vaccines might be easily included in our models, due to scarcity of data about this type of immunization, in the remainder of the paper we only present algorithms and experiments concerning two-doses vaccines.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Università degli Studi di Roma “Tor Vergata”, via del Politecnico, 1, Rome, Italy

    Salvatore Foderaro & Andrea Pacifici

  2. LUMSA University, via Marcantonio Colonna 19, Rome, Italy

    Maurizio Naldi

  3. Università degli Studi Roma Tre, via della Vasca Navale 79, Rome, Italy

    Gaia Nicosia

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  1. Salvatore Foderaro
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  4. Andrea Pacifici
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Correspondence to Maurizio Naldi .

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  1. University of Economics in Katowice, Katowice, Poland

    Ewa Ziemba

  2. University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland

    Witold Chmielarz

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Foderaro, S., Naldi, M., Nicosia, G., Pacifici, A. (2022). Planning a Mass Vaccination Campaign with Balanced Staff Engagement. In: Ziemba, E., Chmielarz, W. (eds) Information Technology for Management: Business and Social Issues. FedCSIS-AIST ISM 2021 2021. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 442. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98997-2_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98997-2_5

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