Unmanned Aerial Vehicle in the Logistics of Pandemic Vaccination: An Exact Analytical Approach for Any Number of Vaccination Centres

While the development and manufacture of pandemic vaccines is a daunting task, the greatest challenge lies in how to deliver these vaccines to billions of people around the world. This requires an efficient strategy of deliveries, at constrained costs and deadlines. This paper proposes an exact analytical approach and operational strategy to the logistics of any pandemic vaccination efforts, applicable both to sparsely populated areas or deficient infrastructure, and to very dense urban fabrics where mobility is highly constrained. Our strategy consists in dividing the territory concerned into zones and districts in a concentric way. We opt for the use of unmanned aerial vehicles to free ourselves from land constraints. This involves serving, from a logistics centre (central depot), any number n of vaccination centres, while optimizing costs and deadlines. We have determined all equivalent and optimal flight path plans for a fixed and optimal number of drones, which depend on domain D(d); d being the demand of vaccination centers. The analysis of the results led us to define what we will call the “degeneracy of domain D”. All our results are expressed as a function of the parameter n.