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Abstract
This paper addresses integrated inventory and distribution planning considering patient safety in the healthcare supply chain. The healthcare supply chain structure consists of one supplier and many buyers such as hospitals or health centers. We consider a finite horizon, multi-periods and multi-buyers where a fleet of capacitated vehicles transport medicines from the suppliers to meet the demand specified by many distinct buyers at each period. We formulate the integrated inventory and distribution planning considering patient safety as a mixed-integer optimization problem, which is NPhard optimization model. We develop a genetic algorithm which represents new chromosome with suitable crossover and mutation operators for vehicle routing and inventory solutions. The comparison of results shows the significance of the proposed GA demonstrates the capability of reaching solutions within 8% of the optimum on sets of test problems.
Key Words: Healthcare supply chain management, Patient safety, Genetic algorithm.
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1.Introduction
From both the recent practical and academic standpoints, the emphasis in supply chain management (SCM) is strongly skewed toward the healthcare industry with the increasing standard of living. The most important contribution of SCM from suppliers to customers is the cost-effective inventories with high customer service level. Likewise, in the healthcare industry, effective and efficient supply of medicines to healthcare services by minimizing the inventory and transportation costs must be balanced by the need to maintain a high service level for patient safety. To overcome this difficult situation in the increasingly more complex and wider healthcare industry, it is natural to apply supply chain concepts to the healthcare industry.
In this paper, we minimize the integrated inventory distribution cost occurring in supplying the appropriate quantity of medicine from one supplier to each hospital while improving patient safety level in each hospital. In previous studies, there have been no cases dealing with integrated inventory and transportation management on healthcare industry with patient safety. To aid in resolving this problem, we propose the inventory routing problem (IRP) in which inventory control and vehicle routing decisions are made simultaneously to meet patient safety for each time period over a specific planning horizon. In other words, IRP combines an inventory control problem with a vehicle routing problem considering patient safety. IRP considering patient safety is formulated as...