Title: A decision support model of demand forecast for national immunisation vaccines

Authors: Ruey-Kei Chiu, Chien-Wu Kuo

Addresses: Department of Information Management, Fu Jen Catholic University, 510 Chung Cheng Rd, Hsinchuang City, Taipei County 24205, Taiwan. ' Department of Information Management, Fu Jen Catholic University, 510 Chung Cheng Rd, Hsinchuang City, Taipei County 24205, Taiwan

Abstract: This paper presents a demand forecast and optimal allocation model to support the decision making of national vaccine purchase. This research attempts to use ARIMA and Neural Network models respectively to forecast two individual values of |The yearly total number of inoculations| and |The annual birthrate| for the next year, and then choose the reasonable and better results generated from one of these two models to conduct a further forecast of |The yearly total demand volume in doses of vaccines|. According to the experimental results, this research indeed may provide a feasible decision model for yearly vaccine procurement for Taiwan|s government immunisation authority and establishes an optimal demand forecast model for a specific vaccine like DTP vaccine.

Keywords: demand forecasting; neural networks; optimal decision model; time series; vaccine management; vaccine control; decision support systems; DSS; national immunisation; allocation optimisation; decision making; Taiwan; vaccine procurement; yearly vaccine demand.

DOI: 10.1504/IJEH.2006.008699

International Journal of Electronic Healthcare, 2006 Vol.2 No.1, pp.92 - 104

Published online: 16 Jan 2006 *

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