1, with and without Rota. These scenarios were provided by the Benin Ministry of Health and were potential redesigns under consideration at the time: • Health Zone ( Fig. 1b): consolidating the 80 Communes at the third level of the supply chain into the 34 Health Zones already established and used

by other health commodity supply chains. For each scenario, additional experiments replaced current transport routes at the lowest level (i.e., motorcycles traveling directly between the Health Posts and the level above to collect vaccines) with truck loops in which a 4 × 4 truck originating from the higher level served multiple Health Posts with a single shipping loop. Shipping loops were formed for each scenario using an iterative algorithm that takes a given selleck chemical number of required locations for each loop, simulates 100,000 potential loops, and then chooses the route that minimizes the distance travelled. Based on reasonable assumptions regarding the number of clinics served per shipping loop, sensitivity analyses varied the number of Health Posts served per loop from four to ten. Each experiment corresponded to one simulated year (2012) and the

following outcomes were generated: • vaccine availability = (number of people vaccinated/number of vaccination opportunities). A vaccination opportunity occurs Quisinostat when a simulated individual arrives to a Health Post for a vaccine or set of vaccines. The number of vaccination opportunities is determined based on the mean number of people who arrive at the clinic for vaccination; these arrivals are generated randomly from a population with a census-based age distribution, and each individual arrives according to the

vaccine schedule given in Appendix A. In order to assess investments needed to maximize the vaccine availability for each scenario, additional storage devices were added as needed and priced by Benin’s cMYP. Cold rooms were added at the National and Department levels, TCW 3000 refrigerators at the Commune level, and TCW Levetiracetam 2000 refrigerators at the Health Posts. Both refrigerators are WHO pre-qualified, and a 150L refrigerator at the Commune level and a 76L refrigerator at the Health Posts were appropriate to remain consistent with current equipment inventories. Table 1 lists the resulting vaccine availability, logistics costs per dose administered, and annual recurring operating costs (as defined by the equations in Section 2) for each of the scenarios. Table 2 summarizes the capital expenditures required under each scenario to relieve bottlenecks at each level to achieve 100% vaccine availability. Table 3 displays the net cost saved or incurred over 5 years for each scenario, compared to the baseline scenario. All cost results reported are averages across 10 simulation runs, and the standard deviation for each set of simulation runs was within 1% of the mean. Face validity of our baseline results was established in discussions with health officials in Benin.