Dynamic vaccine distribution model based on epidemic diffusion rule and clustering approach

Due to the fact that the emergency medicine distribution is vital to the quick response to urgent demand when an epidemic occurs, the optimal vaccine distribution approach is explored according to the epidemic diffusion rule and different urgency degrees of affected areas with the background of the epidemic outbreak in a given region. First, the SIQR （susceptible, infected, quarantined,recovered） epidemic model with pulse vaccination is introduced to describe the epidemic diffusion rule and obtain the demanded vaccine in each pulse. Based on the SIQR model, the affected areas are clustered by using the self-organizing map （SOM） neutral network to qualify the results. Then, a dynamic vaccine distribution model is formulated, incorporating the results of clustering the affected areas with the goals of both reducing the transportation cost and decreasing the unsatisfied demand for the emergency logistics network. Numerical study with twenty affected areas and four distribution centers is carried out. The corresponding numerical results indicate that the proposed approach can make an outstanding contribution to controlling the affected areas with a relatively high degree of urgency, and the comparison results prove that the performance of the clustering method is superior to that of the non-clustering method on controlling epidemic diffusion.