Abstract
A multi-item inventory distribution problem motivated by a practical case study occurring in the logistic operations of a hospital is considered. There, a single warehouse supplies several nursing wards. The distribution of medical products is done by two different teams of workers using a heterogeneous fleet, that is, the available vehicles have different capacities and different structures required to be used in specific nursing wards. The goal is to define a weekly distribution plan of medical products ensuring a balanced workload of both working teams and satisfying all the required constraints (inventory capacities, safety stock levels, vehicle capacities, etc.) that minimizes the total number of visits to locations. A mixed integer formulation is presented and several improvements are discussed. This is a NP-hard problem hardly solved to optimality within a reasonable amount of time, and more so for real size instances, with hundreds to few thousand of products. To circumvent this issue, a matheuristic is proposed to solve the problem. Finally, computational tests are reported and discussed.
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Acknowledgements
The research of the first and third authors is partially supported through CIDMA and FCT, the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, within project UID/MAT/ 04106/2019. The research of the second author is financed by National Funds through the Portugese funding agency, FCT-Fundação para Ciência e Tecnologia within project: UID/ EEA/50014/2019.
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Agra, A., Cerveira, A., Requejo, C. (2019). Logistic Operations in a Hospital: A Multi-item Inventory Distribution Problem with Heterogeneous Fleet. In: Barbosa-Povoa, A., Jenzer, H., de Miranda, J. (eds) Pharmaceutical Supply Chains - Medicines Shortages. Lecture Notes in Logistics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15398-4_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15398-4_16
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