Inventory policy for the vaccine of a new pandemic

TL;DR

This paper develops an inventory model for vaccine stock management during a pandemic, focusing on supply safety over cost, and applies it to simulate initial stock levels for different countries with varying vaccination willingness.

Contribution

It introduces a Hungarian inventory model tailored for pandemic vaccines, accounting for non-linear vaccination willingness and supply safety in a single-period setting.

Findings

The model achieves prescribed non-shortage probabilities.

Simulation results vary with country-specific vaccination willingness.

Initial stock levels can be effectively determined using the proposed approach.

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic showed that stocking and procuring vaccines are different from the inventory holding problems of production. The safety of the supply is more important than cost minimization. The Hungarian inventory model is applied to determine the initial stock if the probability of the non-shortage is given. This initial stock is the function of the procurements. The problem is non-linear as the willingness to be vaccinated is a sigmoid function of the time. The stocking of vaccines is a single-period inventory problem. The cases of three countries are simulated. The countries are Denmark, Hungary, and Mexico. They have different characteristics of willingness to be vaccinated. The numerical results of the simulation show that the prescribed probability of non-shortage can be achieved.