VacDist MAS for Covid-19 Vaccination Distribution: Palestine as a Case Study

The infectious COVID-19 outbreak has put an enormous load on the healthcare systems and the economy. It significantly impacted death rates and overall society immunity. Fortunately, vaccines have an apparent effect on enhancing an individual’s immunity to specific diseases. In the early periods of the COVID-19 pandemic, health authorities had limited quantities of the vaccine and urgently needed to optimize vaccine purchase and allocation. This study introduced the VacDist framework, a multi-agent system for COVID-19 vaccination distribution for the Palestinian population during the COVID-19 pandemic. VacDist provides a complete vaccination system starting from the effective purchase of the vaccine until vaccinated citizens. The results of VacDist significantly outperform the traditional strategy in fairly distributing the vaccine to reach the most significant number of citizens. The multi-agent model developed in this study can be used to support decision-makers and aid in designing dynamic, optimal health interventions to counter COVID-19 and other disease outbreaks.