Passive cold devices for vaccine supply chains

Sheng-I Chen, Bryan Norman, Jayant Rajgopal () and Bruce Lee

Annals of Operations Research, 2015, vol. 230, issue 1, 87-104

Abstract: A major priority in many low and middle income countries is the eradication of infectious diseases through an effective vaccination program. However, the lack of reliable infrastructure, equipment and support often prove to be significant barriers in such countries. In particular, unreliable electric power and refrigeration equipment are major concerns and this has prompted research into the development of passive cold storage devices (PCDs) that are not dependent on electric power and can maintain cold temperatures for extended periods of time using a passive medium such as ice. The development of PCDs is in its early stages, and there are many open questions including how they should be sized, the interaction between price and device size, and how often they should be replenished. So far, these types of questions have not been systematically analyzed anywhere in the research literature, and this paper describes a model to address these issues in order to better guide the development of PCDs in the near future. This paper examines actual use cases with real data from a representative country, and presents a model that captures the various tradeoffs that must be considered in developing a suitable PCD while providing guidance on what would constitute a useful, robust and economical design. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015

Keywords: Vaccines; Supply chain; Cold chain; Cold storage device; Device design (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10479-013-1502-5 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:annopr:v:230:y:2015:i:1:p:87-104:10.1007/s10479-013-1502-5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/10479

DOI: 10.1007/s10479-013-1502-5

Access Statistics for this article

Annals of Operations Research is currently edited by Endre Boros

More articles in Annals of Operations Research from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().