Design of a pharmaceutical supply chain in uncertain conditions considering financial strategies and environmental concerns

Abstract

One of the most pressing concerns of patients is the timely delivery of required medicines at the appropriate time and location, as a lack of medicines can have a direct impact on their health. A multi-product and multi-period integer programming model is presented in this paper to design a pharmaceutical supply chain network with different layers: supplier, manufacturer, distributor, and customer. The proposed model's main goal is to maximize profits across the entire pharmaceutical supply chain. Revenues come from the sale of pharmaceuticals both domestically and internationally. Expenses include transportation, production, the procurement of materials, manufacturer establishment, distribution center establishment, inventory holding, medicines expiration, ordering, and loans. In the suggested model, import and export, customs tariffs, loans, and currencies are all presented. Environmental concerns about greenhouse gas emissions from transportation throughout the supply chain are also considered. A case study for the province of Fars is presented to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed model. While numerical results confirm the model's effectiveness, they also show that as the level of uncertainty increases, profitability decreases; however, profitability can be enhanced by carefully regulating characteristics such as fixed cost of manufacturer construction and fixed cost of distribution center construction.