Supply Chain Management
This is a pretty straight forward assignment. It is attached below. Thanks for your time!
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
