| dc.description.abstract | COVID-19 has had a significant impact on the world economy. The COVID-19 vaccine is
widely recognized as the most promising method of combating the epidemic and assisting
in the return to normalcy. By establishing appointment platforms, many countries have
permitted some types of vaccines for vaccinations. Vaccination presents a significant
problem to those in charge of arranging a big number of appointments. This thesis studies
a vaccination site selection, appointment acceptance, appointment assignment, and
scheduling problem for vaccination in response to COVID-19. An optimal solution to the
problem determines the open vaccination sites, the set of accepted appointments, the
assignment of accepted appointments to open vaccination sites, and the vaccination
sequence at each site. The objective is to simultaneously minimize 1) the fixed cost for
operating vaccination sites; 2) the traveling distance of vaccine recipients; 3) the
appointment rejection cost; and 4) the vaccination tardiness cost. The problem was
formulated as a mixed-integer linear program (MILP) solved by CPLEX with cost
constraints such as the cost of opening the vaccination point, the non-moving cost, the
rejection cost and the late cost. In addition, we have constraints with the operating time of
the opening and closing points. The results showed that with a network of 22 vaccination
points it was possible to process up to 4000 appointments per day and the time for each
schedule was about 30 minutes. This is a perfectly feasible and subservient result to reality. | en_US |
