Linear programming with fuzzy parameters for inventory routing problem in effective management of personal protective equipment: a case study of corona virus disease 2019

Abstract

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) brings about severe disruptions for human living, economics, and environmental balance. This pandemic has boosted the demand for personal protective equipment (PPE) and thus, medical wastes. Thus, a research hypothesis is stated whether it would be possible to provide more efficient distribution and inventory planning to optimize the PPE availability in a fuzzy environment. To confirm the hypothesis, in addition to addressing a scientific novelty considering integration of linear programming with fuzzy parameters, named as the Jimenez's method and clustering heuristic methods, the practicality of these approaches is provided on a real case study and generated instances from Turkey. The computational results reveal that clustering the 32% of the hospitals ensures optimum total cost and solution time while feasibility degree changes between 0, 4, and 1 values of the Jimenez are not more effective on the results. Improved cost results reveal the economic importance of the healthcare supply chain management and optimal PPE distribution and inventory planning can break down the disease propagation and reduce the detrimental impacts on human life. The proposed approach, for the first time, ensures practical and theoretical insights of distribution and storage decisions across disciplines, namely, engineering and health-care organization authorities.

Identifying resilience strategies for disruption management in the healthcare supply chain during COVID-19 by digital innovations: A systematic literature review

“…Providing efficient deployment and inventory design to enhance personal protective equipment availability in a fuzzy environment has been proposed in Ref. [ 17 ], and the utility of these methods is examined in this study. The proposed approach provides practical and theoretical insights into institution-wide deployment and storage decisions for a variety of engineering and medical institutions.…”

“…Despite the importance of health management systems, SCM and inventory management receive little attention. Taking these issues into account can have a significant impact on cost as well as the quality of healthcare [ 2 , 17 , 18 ]. For supply chain management and control, numerous tools have been developed and used in the logistical revolution that fits logistical processes with the requirements of the new manufacturing process.…”

Safety-Stock: Predicting the demand for supplies in Brazilian hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…The tool is freely available in https://cemeai.shinyapps.io/BioNexo-Argentina/ (in Spanish). For future research, we suggest integrating the proposed system with optimization tools that support PPE inventory management between multiple hospitals, as in [23] , alleviating shortages in situations similar to the COVID-19 pandemic.…”

A sustainable medical waste collection and transportation model for pandemics

“…They designed a hybrid meta-heuristic algorithm to tackle the problem using several numerical simulation cases. A fuzzy inventory-routing problem (IRP) was introduced by Göçmen (2020) to manage the distribution of personal protective equipment (PPE) during the COVID-19 pandemic. They applied Jimenez’s method and clustering heuristic techniques to evaluate the performance of their model using a real case study problem in Turkey.…”