Supply Chain Network Model using Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for COVID-19

Abstract

The COVID-19 vaccination management in Japan has revealed many problems. The number of vaccines available was clearly less than the number of people who wanted to be vaccinated. Initially, the system was managed by making reservations with age group utilizing vaccination coupons. After the second round of vaccinations, only appointments for vaccination dates were coordinated and vaccination sites were set up in Shibuya Ward where the vaccine could be taken freely. Under a shortage of vaccine supply, the inability to make appointments arose from a failure to properly estimate demand. In addition, the vaccine expired due to inadequate inventory management, resulting in the vaccine being discarded. This is considered to be a supply chain problem in which appropriate supply could not be provided in response to demand. In response to this problem, this paper examines whether it is possible to avoid shortage and stock discards by a decentralized management system for easy on-site inventory control instead of a centralized management system in real world. Based on a multi-agent model, a model was created to redistribute inventory to clients by predicting future shortage based on demand fluctuations and past inventory levels. The model was constructed by adopting the Kanto region. The validation results of the model showed that the number of discards was reduced by about 70% and out-of-stocks by about 12% as a result of learning the dispersion management and out-of-stock forecasting.