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Mobile COVID-19 vaccination scheduling with capacity selection

Mobile COVID-19 vaccination scheduling with capacity selection

Tang, Lianhua, Li, Yantong, Zhang, Shuai ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9796-058X, Wang, Zheng and Coelho, Leandro C. (2024) Mobile COVID-19 vaccination scheduling with capacity selection. Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, 193:103826. ISSN 1366-5545 (Print), 1878-5794 (Online) (doi:10.1016/j.tre.2024.103826)

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Abstract

Massive COVID-19 vaccination can significantly reduce both mild and severe infection rates. Some governments have adopted mobile vaccination vehicles, offering a more convenient and flexible service compared to static walk-in sites. This paper addresses a new scheduling problem arising from the mobile COVID-19 vaccination planning practice. Given a set of communities, each with a specific number of residents to vaccinate, the objective is to assign mobile vaccination vehicles to communities and determine each vehicle’s service capacity and routes, attempting to minimize the total operational cost. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to tackle the joint chal- lenge of mass vaccination scheduling and routing. We formulate the problem as a mixed-integer nonlinear program model, which we linearize by treating each vehicle with multiple stations as separate units. Given that the problem is NP-hard, we then developed a tailored adaptive large neighborhood search (ALNS) approach that effectively solves practical-sized instances by utilizing the intrinsic structure of the problem. To illustrate the efficiency of the suggested model and so- lution methodologies, we conduct numerical experiments on instances of varying sizes. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed ALNS algorithm in solving instances with realis- tic sizes, efficiently handling up to 100 communities and 14 vaccination vehicles. In addition, a case study shows that our method significantly reduces operational expenses compared to some experience-based greedy methods.

Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: scheduling, mobile vaccination, planning and routing, capacity selection, adaptive large neighbourhood search
Subjects: H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General)
H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor > HD61 Risk Management
R Medicine > R Medicine (General)
Faculty / School / Research Centre / Research Group: Greenwich Business School
Greenwich Business School > School of Business, Operations and Strategy
Last Modified: 21 Jan 2025 16:41
URI: http://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/48409

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