Optimizing warehousing and transportation for a network of healthcare institutions: case of Territorial Hospital Group in France

ABSTRACT

This study deals with the warehousing and the transportation of products in a network of healthcare institutions. The general problem is rich location routing problem (LRP) considering demands of multiproducts to be allocated to a set of potential depots and a set of products to be delivered to healthcare institutions, while pickups and deliveries are from and to depots and healthcare institutions at the same time. One parking for vehicles is considered in the network, and each route starts and ends at the parking. A mixed integer linear programming is provided as a tool for the decision-maker to choose the best pooling configuration and decide the degree of flexibility of problem parameters such as time window length for demands, heterogeneity of the depots and vehicles, location of the depots and their capacities, etc., with the objective to save warehousing and transportation costs for the whole network.

KEYWORDS:

• Warehousing
• transportation
• rich location routing problem
• pickup and delivery
• multiproducts
• hospital network

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

O. Saidi

O. Saidi is a PhD student at Université Jean-Monnet Saint Etienne, France. She holds an engineering degree in industrial software and automation from Institut National des Sciences Appliquées et de Technologie (INSAT), Tunisia and a master’s degree in industrial engineering from Université Jean Monnet Saint-Etienne, France. Her main research interests are supply chain management and logistics optimisation. Her email address is [email protected]

M. Masmoudi

M. Masmoudi is engineer and PhD in industrial engineering. He is currently associate professor at Sharjah University, UAE, and was the head of the industrial engineering Master at Jean-Monnet University, France, from 2013 to 2021. He received the Doctorate of Sciences (Habilitation) from Jean-Monnet University in 2017. His main research interests are the applications of data science and optimisation techniques to various engineering and management fields. He published two springer books in data science and more than twenty-five international journal papers in operations research and industrial engineering. His email address is [email protected]

K. Kobbold

K. Kobbold is an Industrial System Engineer (Polytech Lyon), he also holds a research master’s degree in computer science decision support for companies (Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1) and a master’s degree in business administration (IAE Lyon). Senior Manager Associate at CERCLH (www.cerclh.com), he has more than 10 years of experience in consulting and supporting healthcare establishments in large-scale and organisational transformation projects. He supports several health and medico-social structures on issues of optimisation and restructuring of services involving both the organisational, architectural and medico-economic dimension. His email address is [email protected]

E. Lizarazo

E. Lizarazo holds a Ph.D in industrial engineering from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Saint-Etienne, France. Currently, he is researcher member of the LASPI laboratory and Associate Professor at Université Jean Monnet, Saint-Etienne, France. His research interests include modelling, simulation and optimisation of health care systems and medical decision-making. His email address is [email protected]

P. Albert

P. Albert holds a Ph.D. in industrial engineering from the Ecole Centrale de Nantes, France. Currently, he is researcher member of the LASPI laboratory at Universite Jean Monnet, Saint-Etienne, France. His research interests include modelling, simulation and optimisation of health care systems. His email address is [email protected]