Last-Mile Delivery of Malaria Prevention Products in the DRC: An Inventory Management Model Under Supply Chain Disruptions

Improved Inventory Management to Reduce Malaria Rates in the Congo Humanitarian operations in some of the world’s most remote regions often require ingenuity. Still, much can be applied from the extensive research on successfully managing operations in more common and often stable settings. Occasionally, this convergence of existing models with the unique considerations of these settings arrives at a void in the literature. The authors found themselves at such a point when they partnered with the Lake Tanganyika Floating Health Clinic to deliver malaria prevention products across 41 villages in the far East of the Congo. To allow continuous access to these products in a region that experiences seasonal flooding and frequent armed conflict, the authors introduce a model that incorporates random availability of high-capacity primary delivery methods with agile and costlier secondary delivery methods during disruptions. The optimal policy when the fixed cost varies between the disrupted and normal states is not previously addressed in Markovian inventory model results. The authors of the paper prove that an (s, S) policy remains optimal during normal operations even when facing these specific cost dynamics. They conduct numerical analysis demonstrating that the use of an (s, S) policy in normal operating periods and an order-up-to policy in the disrupted state is often optimal although they provide counterexamples of instances when it is not. Reducing costs in such settings allows for more potentially life-saving interventions to reach those in need.