Thesis Defense - İrina Pınar Tuğrul (MSIE)

İrina Pınar Tuğrul – M.Sc. Industrial Engineering

Asst. Prof. Zehra Melis Teksan – Advisor

Date: 24.05.2022

Time: 09:30

Location: AB1 232

“Demand and Supply Planning for Covid-19 Vaccine in Turkey with an Anti-vaccine Survey”

Thesis Committee

Asst. Prof. Zehra Melis Teksan, Özyeğin University

Prof. Semra Ağralı, MEF University

Asst. Prof. Enis Kayış, Özyeğin University

Abstract:

Covid-19 affects us in a very harmful way and the most important action to end this pandemic is to reach high vaccination rates. As the attitude towards vaccination might differ across subpopulations, vaccine hesitancy might affect all purchasing, distribution, and allocation decisions of vaccines. If the predicted demand is higher, we would purchase vaccines more than we need and we have to deal with wastage and purchasing costs. If the predicted demand is less than the actual demand, we would miss the opportunity to vaccinate more people and get closer to the end of the pandemic. So, by predicting the demand in an accurate way, we can make more meaningful decisions in our supply chain. We conduct a survey and try to understand the behavior of individuals in Turkey by asking questions about the side effects of vaccines, the acceptance of vaccines, the distrust of the government, and the number of cases announced. The responses help us plan the supply chain weekly, considering most of the thoughts of the community. After forecasting the weekly demand, we created a Multi-Objective Optimization Model whose aim is to minimize the total costs of purchasing, transportation, storage, backordering and to reach the herd immunity. In this model, we consider storage and transportation capacity limits, the minimum required vaccination rate to reach herd immunity and vaccine demand satisfaction with respect to the priorities of cities.

Bio:

İrina Pınar Tuğrul graduated from İbrahim Önal Anatolian Teacher Training High School in 2014.  She received her B.Sc. degree in Industrial Engineering from İstanbul Şehir University in August 2019. She has been pursuing her M.Sc. degree in Industrial Engineering at Özyeğin University since January 2020, under the supervision of Asst. Prof. Zehra Melis Teksan. Her research interests include forecasting, supply chain management, and stochastic processes.