A Fix‐And‐Optimize Matheuristic to Solve the Location‐Allocation of Vaccination Facilities: Case of Jalisco, Mexico

ABSTRACT Approximately 755 million cases and 7 million deaths have been reported since the COVID‐19 pandemic. Based on the availability of vaccines to contain the spread of COVID‐19, various vaccination plans have been implemented globally, some more effective than others, depending on each country's social, territorial, economic, and political circumstances. In Mexico and other Latin American countries with similar situations, COVID‐19 vaccinations have almost exclusively relied on ephemeral mass vaccination facilities and existing healthcare infrastructure. However, other countries (e.g., the USA and Canada) have opted into pharmacy‐based immunization (PBI), which uses community and/or chain pharmacies as vaccination facilities to provide more accessible immunization services. This research aims to evaluate the feasibility and expected performance if PBI had been used in Mexico. Therefore, we propose a mathematical formulation to address the location–allocation problem underlying the pharmacy selection and the assignment of individuals to them. However, since commercial solvers cannot efficiently address the resulting formulation for real‐sized instances, the formulation is embedded into a heuristic fix‐and‐optimize scheme to explore the solution space more efficiently. The case of Jalisco, Mexico, is used to illustrate the performance of the proposed approach.