A vaccine can be perfectly made and still fail before reaching a patient. Its safety may depend on an invisible journey: keeping it cold, watched, and accounted for every step of the way. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the main challenge was to keep the integrity of the vaccine.

COVID-19 vaccines are temperature sensitive and require careful monitoring during shipping. The vaccine’s integrity depends on maintaining a cold chain, because COVID-19 vaccines are temperature sensitive and require careful monitoring during shipping.

That cold-chain process must extend from manufacturing to the administration site, and maintaining it correctly is essential for achieving vaccine efficacy. Storage itself is challenging: most vaccines need two to eight degrees, while some coronavirus vaccines require temperatures as low as minus seventy degrees Celsius.

That is why connected devices matter: they can support alerts when conditions change, share data, manage connections, secure shipments, and track and monitor them in real time. But those capabilities only work if the right digital platform is chosen, and supply managers may lack the experience or technical knowledge to make that choice.

IoT platforms offer multiple features, but using those features effectively requires choosing and deploying the right platform for the task. Because platform selection is a concern, the useful choice is the one that fits logistics and transportation for COVID-19 vaccine delivery.

The framework focuses on evaluating, ranking, and selecting a connected technology platform for the logistics and transportation of COVID-19 vaccines. It combines two decision-making approaches to assess the platforms. After the experts’ responses were collected, the result was a table matching the platforms with the features they offered.

That table became the decision matrix used in the next step. The criteria were then given different weights, and the platforms were evaluated and prioritized. For choosing an internet-of-things platform, the priorities are not equal: the ability to grow as demand increases receives the strongest emphasis, while the remaining features receive noticeably smaller weights.

That makes future growth the central concern in the later platform ranking. Using the study’s criteria, Microsoft Azure was judged the best choice among the selected connected platforms. The study compared all selected IoT platforms, and that comparison supported identifying Microsoft Azure as the best choice under the proposed criteria.

A second approach produced the same leading platform: Microsoft Azure had the highest ranking score among the selected platforms. The researchers therefore concluded that the numerical results were accurate and consistent, and that the decision model was validated. The results give supply managers a clearer understanding of which platform features matter and how important they are relative to one another.

The framework is intended to cover the different dimensions of connected platforms, so managers do not have to choose features without guidance. The selected platform can manage connected sensors and provide location information, allowing cargo, vehicles, or other assets to be monitored across wide distances and difficult environments.

It also provides fleet management, including information about vehicles, drivers, and routes. The proposed method produces promising results and covers the features used in the decision, but limitations may still affect how practical and stable it is.

The study offers a structured way to choose the digital platform that best supports vaccine transport. In its comparison, Microsoft Azure ranked highest and was also supported by a separate check.