Design of shared unit-dose drug distribution network using multi-level particle swarm optimization

作者：Chen, Linjie; Monteiro, Thibaud^*; Wang, Tao; Marcon, Eric

来源：Health Care Management Science, 2019, 22(2): 304-317.

DOI：10.1007/s10729-018-9438-6

• Facility location
• Logistic management
• Patient safety
• Process improvement
• Multi-level optimization
• Particle swarm optimization
• Meta-heuristic
• Capacitated location routing problem

Unit-dose drug distribution systems provide optimal choices in terms of medication security and efficiency for organizing the drug-use process in large hospitals. As small hospitals have to share such automatic systems for economic reasons, the structure of their logistic organization becomes a very sensitive issue. In the research reported here, we develop a generalized multi-level optimization method - multi-level particle swarm optimization (MLPSO) - to design a shared unit-dose drug distribution network. Structurally, the problem studied can be considered as a type of capacitated location-routing problem (CLRP) with new constraints related to specific production planning. This kind of problem implies that a multi-level optimization should be performed in order to minimize logistic operating costs. Our results show that with the proposed algorithm, a more suitable modeling framework, as well as computational time savings and better optimization performance are obtained than that reported in the literature on this subject.

• 出版日期2019-6
• 单位中央财经大学