Designing a sustainable-resilient vaccine cold chain network in uncertain environments

In recent years, outbreaks of diseases have been prevalent, significantly impacting human’s work, life and social economy. Vaccination is widely seen as the most promising way to fight against most of the epidemics. However, building a sustainable-resilient vaccine cold chain network is a complex planning problem, which may face various challenges, such as low-temperature transportation and storage, uncertain environments, and waste management. To address these challenges, a distributionally robust vaccine cold chain network design model is established. Using Wasserstein ambiguity set to manage uncertainties, the Wasserstein distributionally robust optimization (WDRO) model can be transformed into a computationally tractable form. A case study on influenza vaccines in Clalit reveals that the proposed WDRO model can yield a robust solution, incurring a small robust price. Conservative decision makers can choose a slightly larger Wasserstein ambiguity set to enhance the supply chain resilience at the cost of reducing economic and environmental benefits.