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Cold chain transportation decision in the vaccine supply chain
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Cold chain transportation decision in the vaccine supply chain

Qi Lin, Qiuhong Zhao and Benjamin Lev
European journal of operational research, v 283(1), pp 182-195
16 May 2020
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2019.11.005
Featured in Collection :   UN Sustainable Development Goals @ Drexel
url
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2019.11.005View
Published, Version of Record (VoR)CC BY-NC-ND V4.0,  Open

Abstract

Cold chain Distributor decision Retailer inspection Supply chain management Vaccine transportation
•Develop a model of the distributor's cold chain transportation decision for vaccines.•Analyze how the retailer's inspection policy affects the distributor's decision.•Compare two common inspection policies to explore some meaningful insights.•Discuss and display the win-win situation between the distributor and the retailer. Vaccines are a special kind of drug, the quality of which is highly sensitive to temperature and directly related to public health. Recently, numerous vaccine-related adverse events have occurred in the world, especially in developing countries, due to vaccines being exposed to inappropriate temperatures during their transportation. This paper considers the vaccine supply chain including a distributor and a retailer (hospital or clinic). The distributor decides to use a cold chain or non-cold chain to transport the vaccines. The retailer performs an inspection when receiving the vaccines. First, a basic model is developed to study the conditions under which the distributor will transport the vaccines via a cold chain or non-cold chain. Then, two common inspection policies (a single-step one and a two-step one) are introduced into the basic model to explore the impact of the retailer's inspection at the end of transportation on the distributor's original decision. We show that the retailer's single-step inspection influences the distributor to choose the cold chain option. Interestingly, we prove that the two-step inspection policy is less effective than the single-step one in this effect. We suggest that the retailer's role in improving the distributor's non-cold chain transportation behavior should be fully used.

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21 Record Views
108 citations in Web of Science
134 citations in Scopus

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UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

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#12 Responsible Consumption & Production

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Collaboration types
Domestic collaboration
International collaboration
Web of Science research areas
Management
Operations Research & Management Science
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