Developing a vaccine distribution network between county towns

Abstract

Without the cold-chain network, it would be impossible in today's world to transport large quantities of perishable goods, primarily food and medicine, over long distances, but it is still very important that the necessary materials reach their destination on time and with adequate cooling. This is absolutely true for the vaccines created to stop the Covid-19 pandemic, which had to be distributed quickly and at certain storage temperatures to all parts of the world. This is a rather difficult task with NP-hard complexity. In this research, we are investigating the optimal way to get from a distribution center in Budapest to the county towns with transport vehicles, so that neither the vaccines deteriorate, nor we violate regulations. For this, we used vehicle route planning principles and Excel-Solver software.

Vaccine distribution network opportunities on a national scale

“…This research was born from a continuous TDK research and partly contains elements of a previous publication from a year ago with the name "Developing a vaccine distribution network between county towns" [6]. For our route planning, we first established that the main centre where the vaccines arrive.…”

“…First, we arranged the settlements in one route in order to find out what is the best distance and time that can be reached and to get a framework that can be used as minimum and maximum for multi-route planning with the Excel SOLVER help based on the distance matrix. [6] Distance As you can see in Fig. 1, with a total distance of 1671 km and about a day it is theoretically possible to visit all the county seats in Hungary.…”

“…Mostly the problem there is time, as the vaccines will go bad in 12 hours and the driver can work for a maximum of 9+2 hours in one seating. In this case, either the driver would break the rules, or/and the vaccines would heat up so much, that they would be useless For this reason, more vehicles and more routes need to introduce in the distribution system [6].…”