Abstract

Childhood vaccination is among the most effective public health interventions, yet ensuring affordable access in low-income countries (LICs) remains challenging. Centralized procurement agencies such as UNICEF and Gavi purchase vaccines antigen-by-antigen through competitive tenders which is a practice that fails to capture the affordability gains attainable by coordinating vaccine products into optimized bundles tailored to each child’s complete immunization schedule. This study develops an Integrated Vaccine Bundle Procurement Framework that shifts the unit of procurement from the antigen level to the vaccine product level. The framework formulates the procurement as the construction and selection of child-level immunization bundles, feasible sets of vaccine products and dose quantities that fully immunize one child under the WHO Expanded Programme on Immunization (EPI) schedule and solves the resulting optimization problem through a column generation algorithm that iterates between a Master Problem, which allocates children across bundles to maximize total consumer surplus, and a Pricing Subproblem, which uses the dual variables of the Master Problem to generate improving bundle configurations.  Using data from the WHO Market Information for Access to Vaccines (MI4A) database, covering 9 WHO EPI vaccines, 14 manufacturers, and a target population of 28 million children, we conduct a 32 full-factorial experiment varying reservation price and production capacity at three levels each, with 100 stochastic replications per scenario for a total of 900 experimental runs. The framework improved total consumer surplus over the antigen-by-antigen baseline in all nine experimental scenarios. A two-way ANOVA identified reservation price as the only statistically significant factor, with improvements peaking at the Mid level where willingness-to-pay approaches average procurement costs. A stable dominant bundle covering 53.6%–67.6% of the target population emerged across scenarios, suggesting practical implementation may require only a small pre-specified portfolio without full re-optimization each cycle. These findings establish vaccine bundle procurement as a viable complement to existing UNICEF tenders, particularly for middle-income Gavi-eligible LICs.

Publication Date

4-22-2026

Document Type

Thesis

Student Type

Graduate

Degree Name

Industrial and Systems Engineering (MS)

Department, Program, or Center

Industrial and Systems Engineering

College

Kate Gleason College of Engineering

Advisor

Ruben Proaño

Advisor/Committee Member

Nasibeh Azadeh Fard

Campus

RIT – Main Campus

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