چكيده به لاتين
Abstract:
Vaccination is an important part of health chain which contains high costs. Vaccine supply chain can be defined as the combination of all the activities related to transportation of vaccine from raw materials to final costumers. Since providing vaccines in right conditions for people in right places and right times is critical, accurate programing for vaccine supply chain is necessary.
In this thesis, we propose a network design for vaccine supply chain and determine strategic and tactical decisions. In our network design, we consider environmental uncertainties and applied it to our model through demands parameter and costs parameters. We use robust counter-part approach for handling these uncertainties.
Vaccines have specific duration time which after that, they lose their effectiveness or even spoil. Since vaccines are sensitive to heat and freezing, corruption of them during in supply chain is so probable. Distribution of spoiled vaccines among people may have disaster effects in society. So, in this thesis the perishability of vaccines are considered too. Distinguishing between high and low priority for vaccine demands and limitation of centers’ capacity are other unique feature of this thesis.
We provide vaccine supply chain of Iran as real-world case study for this thesis and both robust and deterministic models are implemented on it. The preliminary results have indicated that the proposed robust model performs better than the deterministic one for designing vaccine network.
Keywords: Vaccine supply chain, Network design, Uncertainties, Robust optimization, Perishability
