Optimizing Vaccine Distribution for Different Age Groups of Population Using DE Algorithm

Vaccination is one of the most promising methods to control the epidemic spread by protecting the most vulnerable population and reducing the number of susceptible population who are exposed to the virus. However, the vaccine doses are usually limited and can only be supplied during the epidemic outbreak. How to distribute the vaccines to different populations to reduce the total number of infectious people is important to the public health. In this paper, a DE algorithm is proposed to solve the problem by searching for the optimal strategy to distribute the limited vaccines to different age groups of population. The performance of the algorithm is compared with three strategies in the literature. The results show that the proposed algorithm can offer more effective vaccine distributions significantly.