Journal of Industrial Engineering and Management Studies

Abstract Since human societies have endured massive financial disruptions and life losses after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is critical to eliminate this disease as soon as possible. Today, the invention of the COVID-19 vaccine made this objective more reachable. But unfortunately, the suppliant of the vaccines is limited. Hence, to prevent further lethal harms, it seems rational to use a scientific method for vaccine allocation. This study proposes a method for prioritizing the patients based on their level of life-threatening danger according to the proven risk factors (e.g., age, sex, pregnancy, and underlying diseases) of the COVID-19. That is a new data-driven decision-making method for patients’ classification based on their health condition information using several machine learning algorithms. In this method, vaccine applicants are classified into four classes. The scheduling of vaccine distribution would be conducted based on the results of this classification. Furthermore, a real-life case study is also investigated through the proposed method for better illumination in this paper. The vaccine distribution schedule of the real-case study has been performed with 94% accuracy. It should be mentioned that the main achievement of this research is to design a new efficient method for a vaccine distribution schedule.