Optimal Dynamic Ordering Policies for COVID-19 Vaccines in the Digital Age
Distinguished Research Seminar Series
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Date
06 Apr 2023
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Organiser
Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, PolyU; Research Institute for Advanced Manufacturing (RIAM)
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Time
17:00 - 18:30
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Venue
FJ303
Speaker
Prof. Tsan-Ming CHOI (Jason)
Summary
In the digital age, operations and decision making can be improved by a wise use of information and technological tools. During the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic, governments all around the world commonly faced various vaccine choices having different efficacies and availability at different time points. Demand for vaccination is highly volatile and depends on the disease’s infectiousness. In this paper, we consider a two-stage vaccine ordering problem of a government from a first and only supplier in the first stage and either the same supplier or a new second supplier in the second stage. Between the two stages, information regarding the potential demand for the vaccine is collected and used to update the forecast. Using dynamic programming, we derive the government’s optimal vaccine ordering policy. We find that the government should select its vaccine supplier based on the disease’s infection rate in the country/region. Specifically, when the infection rate is low, the government should order nothing in the first stage and order from the supplier with a higher efficacy level in the second stage. When the disease’s infection rate is high, the government should order vaccines in the first stage and switch to the other supplier with a lower efficacy level in the second stage. Otherwise, ordering from the same supplier at both stages is optimal. To generate more insights, we extend our model to examine (i) the value of blockchain adoption (for cold chain management), and (ii) the impact of vaccines’ side effects.
Keynote Speaker
Prof. Tsan-Ming CHOI (Jason)
Chair in Operations and Supply Chain Management,
Director of the Centre for Supply Chain Research
Management School,
The University of Liverpool, UK.
Professor Tsan-Ming CHOI (Jason) is currently Chair of Operations and Supply Chain Management, and Director of the Centre for Supply Chain Research at the University of Liverpool Management School (ULMS). He has published extensively in leading journals in the fields of operations management (OM), engineering management, logistics, and supply chain management. He is currently serving the profession as the Co-Editor-in-Chief of Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, a Senior Editor of Production and Operations Management (POM), and Decision Support Systems, a Department Editor of IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, and an Associate Editor of Decision Sciences (DSJ), and IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics - Systems. He is listed as a highly cited researcher by Web of Science. Many of his recent OM papers are listed as top-cited in the respective journals (e.g., DSJ, NRL, and POM). In February 2023, he received the JOM Ambassador Paper Award 2023 to recognize the impact and influence of his JOM paper beyond the OM boundary. He has served as a member of the Engineering Panel of Research Grants Council of Hong Kong since 2020. His current research interests include the use of digital technologies for supply chain management, and operational strategies under the pandemics and “new normal”. Before joining ULMS in September 2022, he taught at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and National Taiwan University together for over twenty years.
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