Malaria Case Study

Exercise 2:

After reviewing our options we kept with our initial strategy and left Distribution Centers A and D open as they were the most economically feasible. What we decided to change was the zones that were allocated from the distribution centers. Our final decision was to assign Zone 1 and 3 from DC A and Zone 2,4 and 5 from DC D. This is a change from our previous assignment of Zone 3 and 5 from DC A and Zone 1,2 and 4 from DC D. This change helped us increase our coverage from 6,191 to 6,988, an increase of 797 people covered.

What we considered in our change of strategy was mainly the cost, and worked around that. By choosing the lowest travel cost we were able to employ more sprayers leading to an increase in our coverage. Our second factor to consider was the population of each zone to try to affect the most people and our time selection was based off the risk level in each period.

By assigning zone 1 to distribution center A instead of D we cut our travel costs by $28.30 and by assigning zone 5 to Distribution center D instead of A we again cut our costs by $7.90 which helped cut our overall costs and increase our output. After reassigning zones we made a few changes to our deployments of our spray teams. In exercise 1, we did not deploy sprayers to zone 1 or 5 and in exercise 2 we deployed one team in time period 2 to zone 1 while again leaving zone 5 unattended. In zone 2, we deployed 7 teams in time period 1 instead of 8 in time period 2. For zone 3 we deployed 8 teams in time period 1 and 2 teams in time period 2 compared to 5 teams in time period 1 and 1 team in time period 3. We left zone 4 unchanged with the deployment of 4 teams in time period 1. These changes gave us the highest total effective coverage for the exercise.