Qi Lin, Beihang University

Qi Lin is a 3rd year PhD student from the School of Economics and Management, Beihang University and a visiting scholar in the Decision Sciences and MIS department since October 2018. Her research areas are Healthcare Management and Healthcare Information Exchange.

Title: Cold Chain Transportation Decision in the Vaccine Supply Chain

Abstract: 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 accidents 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 whether to use a cold chain to transport the vaccines or not. 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 loose one and a strict 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 inspection influences the distributor to choose the cold chain option. Interestingly, we prove that the strict inspection policy is less effective than the loose 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.