The World Health Organization (WHO) is responsible for making annual
vaccine strains recommendation to countries around the globe. However,
various studies have found that the WHO vaccine selection strategy has
not been effective in some years. This motivates the search for a better
strategy for choosing vaccine strains. In this work, we use recent results
from theoretical immunology to formulate the vaccine selection problem as a
discrete-time stochastic dynamic program with a high-dimensional
continuous state space. We discuss the techniques that were developed
for solving this difficult dynamic program, and present an effective
heuristic policy. We also compare the performance and practicability of
the optimal policy, the WHO policy, and the heuristic policy.
