Multi-Objective Pharmaceutical Supply Chain Modeling in Disaster (Case Study: Earthquake Crisis in Tehran)

Abstract

Absence of coordination between different sections of pharmaceutical supply chain has been announced as the most important challenge in the medicine industry. These sections are often in conflict and it is possible that their related decisions become suboptimal for the whole supply chain. In this study, a multi-objective mathematical model is offered for pharmaceutical supply chain problem. The model helps make strategic decisions in unexpected disaster occurences such as earthquake and flood. To improve the humanitarian relief in disaster, the model concurrently minimizes the total costs, maximizes the dispersion of distribution centers and minimizes the percentage of drug undersupply as three different objective functions. The model is solved by Torabi-Hassini approach and the performance and importance of objective functions have been compared. In order to verify the proposed model and the relations of different levels of supply chain, Tehran earthquake crisis is considered through different scenarios as the case study. The results illustrate that the highest and lowest demand is in the case of Ray and Mosha fault activation, respectively. Finally, it is shown that increasing the utility of minimizing the percentage of drug undersupply and maximizing dispersion of distribution centers inflicts higher costs on the system.

Keywords

• pharmaceutical supply chain
• disaster
• humanitarian relief
• multi-objective mathematical modeling
• torabi-hassini approach