Designing pharmaceutical supply chain networks with perishable items considering congestion

Increasing competition among various companies has led supply chain managers to devise ways to reduce costs and production times. An important branch of the supply chain, namely the pharmaceutical supply chain network, which plays a significant role in people's lives, is considered in this pape...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inOperational research Vol. 22; no. 4; pp. 4159 - 4219
Main Authors Rekabi, Shabnam, Ghodratnama, Ali, Azaron, Amir
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Berlin/Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 01.09.2022
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects
Business and Management
Chain branching
Competitive advantage
Computational Intelligence
Congestion
Costs
Customers
Greenhouse gases
Inventory
Management Science
Mathematical analysis
Mathematical models
Operating costs
Operations Research
Operations Research/Decision Theory
Original Paper
Pharmaceutical industry
Pharmaceuticals
Production scheduling
Sensitivity analysis
Stochastic models
Supply chain management
Supply chains
Supply chain management
Flexible flow systems
Queueing systems
Green supply chains
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Summary:Increasing competition among various companies has led supply chain managers to devise ways to reduce costs and production times. An important branch of the supply chain, namely the pharmaceutical supply chain network, which plays a significant role in people's lives, is considered in this paper. When it comes to human life, time and accuracy are the most important factors. In this paper, a multi-objective stochastic model is developed to reduce the time of delivering drugs to patients and minimize operating costs of the supply chain, considering congestion in production centers and scheduling jobs in flexible flow shop systems. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is also addressed in this research. Two multi-objective methods, LP-metric and goal attainment, are used to solve the proposed multi-objective model. Finally, to illustrate the performance of the proposed model, several numerical test problems from small to a large extent are solved with a detailed sensitivity analysis. Through analyzing the computational results, confliction among objective functions is analyzed. Moreover, it is concluded that LP-metric outperforms the goal attainment approach profoundly by comparing two solution approaches.
ISSN:1109-2858
1866-1505
DOI:10.1007/s12351-021-00674-x