Sudoku puzzle approach for the drugs assignment in an automated dispensing cabinets

ABSTRACT

In this article, we propose to study one of the real problems of combinatorial optimization in public healthcare and also include in topics of supply chain management in healthcare sector; the assignment of drugs to different compartments of drawers. The aim is to place a set of drugs in the compartments of a drawer, making sure not to place two similar drugs (drugs with packaging or similar sounds but with different contents) in neighbouring compartments. During this research, we were able to establish analogies between the drug assignment problem and the SUDOKU grid filling problem. We will show and justify the interest of using Sudoku approach with some guidelines and effectiveness of this easy method through concrete examples in different cases.

KEYWORDS:

• Automated dispensing cabinets
• dispensing errors
• combinatorial optimization
• quadratic assignment problem
• sudoku puzzle

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.