Search

• The role of operations and SCM in managing epidemics and pandemics is reviewed. • Five research areas are identified, providing an integrative view of the field. • Ten future research directions are developed. • A starting point for researchers to investigate this domain is provided. Epidemics have been posing significant challenges to health, existence, and continuity. From the emergence of an outbreak to its elimination, managing an epidemic/pandemic entails many operations and supply chain management decisions that can contribute to a lessening of its impact. With these decisions, epidemic-/pandemic-imposed challenges related to forecasting, planning, supply, manufacturing, storage, and transportation can be addressed in an effort to curtail and end the epidemic/pandemic. We have witnessed these disruptions first-hand during the COVID-19 pandemic, which has had a destructive effect on many well-established supply chains, threatening the existence of firms. The role of operations and supply chain management is thus pivotal for navigating epidemics/pandemics. Against this background, we present a systematic literature review on the role of operations and supply chain management during epidemics and pandemics, illustrating its potential and calling for future research. Leveraging bibliographic coupling analysis, we identify major research areas and contributions that serve as a foundation to propel these domains forward. We further critically review these research areas, identifying multiple themes of which many have been perennially relevant, while others have come to the fore only recently due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our review provides an integrative view of the field, concurrently advancing theory, and offering ten distinct future research directions. Overall, this paper is meant to serve as a starting point for researchers in operations and supply chain management aiming to investigate this increasingly important domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Best strategies for a large-scale COVID-19 vaccine distribution are developed. • Storage and transportation requirements, as well as costs are considered. • An equitable distribution is considered due to limited vaccine availability. • Best location and allocation decisions for cold storage facilities are provided. • The model is evaluated in a real-world case study. While cold chain management has been part of healthcare systems, enabling the efficient administration of vaccines in both urban and rural areas, the COVID-19 virus has created entirely new challenges for vaccine distributions. With virtually every individual worldwide being impacted, strategies are needed to devise best vaccine distribution scenarios, ensuring proper storage, transportation and cost considerations. Current models do not consider the magnitude of distribution efforts needed in our current pandemic, in particular the objective that entire populations need to be vaccinated. We expand on existing models and devise an approach that considers the needed extensive distribution capabilities and special storage requirements of vaccines, while at the same time being cognizant of costs. As such, we provide decision support on how to distribute the vaccine to an entire population based on priority. We do so by conducting predictive analysis for three different scenarios and dividing the distribution chain into three phases. As the available vaccine doses are limited in quantity at first, we apply decision tree analysis to find the best vaccination scenario, followed by a synthetic control analysis to predict the impact of the vaccination programme to forecast future vaccine production. We then formulate a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model for locating and allocating cold storage facilities for bulk vaccine production, followed by the proposition of a heuristic algorithm to solve the associated objective functions. The application of the proposed model is evaluated by implementing it in a real-world case study. The optimized numerical results provide valuable decision support for healthcare authorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]