Project R-10962

Optimising a cooperative hospital supply chain: integration of location, inventory and routing decisions (Research)

Hospitals are confronted with tight budgets and an increased demand for their services. As a result, they are continuously looking for ways to reduce their costs and improve the efficiency of their processes, while ensuring a high quality of care. Logistics costs are the second largest cost for hospitals, so effectively managing the hospital supply chain (SC) provides significant opportunities to reduce costs. In this project, based on the international trend towards developing hospital networks for providing better care, the benefits of a cooperative hospital SC are investigated. This proposal focuses on fundamental methodological research efforts to develop quantitative decision-support tools which enable the shaping and operational implementation of a cooperative hospital SC. Because of the complexity of hospital SCs, additional real-life characteristics should be included in existing mathematical models, resulting in challenging and innovative operations research problems. Firstly, the optimal structure of a cooperative hospital SC is determined by combining location and inventory decisions. Secondly, operations within a cooperative SC are optimised by integrating inventory and distribution decisions. Thirdly, cost allocation methods are determined to fairly allocate the benefits of a cooperative hospital SC between all hospitals involved. All three decision-support tools are more broadly applicable to real-life problems with characteristics similar to a hospital SC.

01 October 2020 - 30 September 2023