A light‐touch routing optimization tool (RoOT) for vaccine and medical supply distribution in Mozambique

Abstract Planning vaccine distribution in rural and urban poor communities is challenging, due in part to inadequate vehicles, limited cold storage, road availability, and weather conditions. The University of Washington and VillageReach jointly developed and tested a user‐friendly, Excel spreadsheet based optimization tool for routing and scheduling to efficiently distribute vaccines and other medical commodities to health centers across Mozambique. This paper describes the tool and the process used to define the problem and obtain feedback from users during the development. The distribution and routing tool, named route optimization tool (RoOT), uses an indexing algorithm to optimize the routes under constrained resources. Numerical results are presented using five datasets, three realistic and two artificial datasets. RoOT can be used in routine or emergency situations, and may be easily adapted to include other products, regions, or logistic problems.