Vaccine supply chain management: An intelligent system utilizing blockchain, IoT and machine learning

Hui Hu; Jiajun Xu; Mengqi Liu; Ming K Lim

doi:10.1016/j.jbusres.2022.113480

Vaccine supply chain management: An intelligent system utilizing blockchain, IoT and machine learning

J Bus Res. 2023 Feb:156:113480. doi: 10.1016/j.jbusres.2022.113480. Epub 2022 Dec 2.

Authors

Hui Hu^{1

2}, Jiajun Xu², Mengqi Liu³, Ming K Lim⁴

Affiliations

¹ Economic Development Research Centre, Wuhan University, China.
² School of Economics and Management, Wuhan University, China.
³ Business School, Hunan University, China.
⁴ Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow, UK.

Abstract

Vaccination offers health, economic, and social benefits. However, three major issues-vaccine quality, demand forecasting, and trust among stakeholders-persist in the vaccine supply chain (VSC), leading to inefficiencies. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated weaknesses in the VSC, while presenting opportunities to apply digital technologies to manage it. For the first time, this study establishes an intelligent VSC management system that provides decision support for VSC management during the COVID-19 pandemic. The system combines blockchain, internet of things (IoT), and machine learning that effectively address the three issues in the VSC. The transparency of blockchain ensures trust among stakeholders. The real-time monitoring of vaccine status by the IoT ensures vaccine quality. Machine learning predicts vaccine demand and conducts sentiment analysis on vaccine reviews to help companies improve vaccine quality. The present study also reveals the implications for the management of supply chains, businesses, and government.

Keywords: BILSTM, Bidirectional Long-Short Term Memory; Blockchain; CNN, Convolutional Neural Network; COVID-19 pandemic; DTs, Digital Technologies; GRU, Gate Recurrent Unit; IPFS, Interplanetary File System; Intelligent system; Internet of things; IoT, Internet of Things; LSTM, Long-Short Term Memory; Machine learning; RFID, Radio Frequency Identification; RNN, Recurrent Neural Network; VSC, Vaccine Supply Chain; Vaccine supply chain; dApp, Decentralized Application.