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The planning of massive vaccination campaigns often falls to nongovernmental organizations that have to face the critical challenge of vaccinating the largest number of people in the shortest time. This study aims to provide an easy tool for minimizing the duration of mass vaccination campaigns in rural and remote areas of developing countries.

This paper presents a linear mathematical model that combines location, scheduling and routing decisions that allows determining where to locate the vaccination centers, as well as the schedule/route that each medical team must follow to meet the target demand in the shortest time possible. In addition, the paper proposes an heuristic approach that can be integrated in a spreadsheet.

As the numerical experiments show, the proposed heuristic provides good solutions in a short time. Due to its simplicity and flexibility, the proposed approach allows decision-makers to analyze and evaluate several possible scenarios for decision-making by simply playing with input parameters.

The integration of the heuristic approach in a spreadsheet provides a simple and efficient tool to help decision-makers while avoiding the need for large investments in information systems infrastructure by user organizations.

Motivated by a real-life problem and different from previous studies, the objective of the planning is to reduce the length of the vaccination campaigns with the available resources and ensure a target coverage instead of planning for minimizing costs or maximizing coverage. Furthermore, for helping implementation to practitioners, the heuristic can be solved in a spreadsheet.

The purpose of this paper is to present a problem-based learning (PBL) activity that uses a decision support system (DSS) to teach one of the most fundamental topics in distribution planning: vehicle routing.

The authors describe their teaching experience in a logistics and supply chain management (LSCM) course. In the PBL activity proposed, students need to solve a typical vehicle routing case with no previous theoretical background taught. The paper is written as a teaching guide for other instructors, detailing how the activity may be carried out in class.

The PBL activity involved students from the very beginning, challenging them to solve a rather complicated problem. Its acceptance was very positive according to the student feedback survey conducted after the activity. Only when struggling with the difficulties of the case proposed, did students really appreciate the potential value of a DSS for making better decisions. Moreover, this activity raised concerns about how DSSs must be adapted for implementation in every business scenario.

Teaching logistics management goes beyond lecturing on elemental concepts and tools; it is also about applying this knowledge to manage things. Although several PBL initiatives have been reported to be successful in the field of LSCM, this one incorporates a web-based DSS. The main issue in PBL activities is finding authentic and representative problems to develop transferable skills, and currently most logistics problems are solved using DSS.