The problem LoCoWin solves

As we know, a lot of people are facing problems because of the shortage of vaccines and vaccination centres. Specially-abled people and senior citizens face even more inconvenience as travelling to vaccination centres is often difficult for them. These problems are hindering our vaccination drive at this crucial time when we need it the most. So, we are planning to create this platform to solve the aforementioned problems. The vaccine delivery system we have designed makes it easy and very convenient to get vaccinated as soon as possible. Our advanced route planner makes sure that the vaccine delivery vans traverse the most efficient path possible maximizing the vaccination and minimizing vaccine wastage and fuel and time cost. Just register yourself, enter some basic details, your location and you get a list of vaccination venues close to your location. You can pick one according to the data and time of your choosing.

Challenges we ran into

Our main challenge was to come up with a really efficient algorithm to plan the best possible route among the infinitely many routes possible. We looked at various online sources as well as research papers for inspiration to design the algorithm. Choosing the right number of waypoints to assign to a delivery van was another hurdle we faced while developing this system. Coming up with various heuristics to simplify the problem and reduce the runtime was another considerable challenge that had to be solved. Our solution, though quite ingenious, was exceeding the time complexity making it quite unviable to implement. Hence, we had to brainstorm and critically analyze each aspect of the algorithm to bring down the complexity to a reasonable level.

Another challenge was to gather useful data about the population that is currently unvaccinated. We use this data to devise our solution and come up with efficient routes for the respective vans.

It was also challenging to create the API to be able to access the calculated data on the front-end, to make the resultant website user-friendly and present to the user all relevant data as per the stage of vaccination that he/she is currently in.