The centralized architectures of global vaccine supply chains pose severe security, latency, and operational efficiency challenges to new threats of quantum computing. The article introduces the initial combined edge-enabled quantum-safe real-time optimization of vaccine supply chain based on multi-access edge computing (MEC), post-quantum cryptography, lightweight machine learning, and blockchain consensus algorithms. The framework uses autonomous decision-making distributed edge nodes, and uses novel algorithms such as hierarchical attention network to resource allocation (HAN-RA), quantum-inspired route optimization (QIRO) and adaptive multi-agent reinforcement learning (AMARL). CRYSTALS-Kyber, CRYSTALS-Dilithium and SPHINCS+ are post-quantum cryptographic protocols that are resistant to both classical and quantum adversaries. The improvements in performance have been verified experimentally: 68.2 percentage latency reduction (245 to 78 ms), 188.2 percentage throughput increase (850 to 2,450 throughput (TPS)), 19.5 percentage increase in security score (82 to 98/100), and any number of nodes can be scaled linearly to 10,000 nodes. The system has a 97.2% temperature breach detection, 94.8% high-demand prediction and 99.97% uptime during nonstop 72-h operations. This quantum-resistant architecture operates to fill key gaps in existing supply chain models, offering a scalable, secure and efficient system to support mission-critical healthcare logistics and developing theoretical bases of next-generation post-quantum distributed computing systems.
Saha et al. (2026) studied this question.