A fuzzy multi-objective optimization model for sustainable healthcare supply chain network design

Abstract

Healthcare supply chains play a crucial role, which enables the implementation of optimization strategies that have rapidly emerged as highly effective means for improving the overall structure of pharmaceutical and healthcare supply chains.. In the healthcare industry, parameters such as increasing the quality of service, as well as optimizing costs, environmental, and social factors play a unique role in supply chain management. To improve the healthcare supply chain network, this study proposed a novel optimization model to optimize multiple objectives, including minimizing the total costs and environmental impacts, while maximizing the social factors by creating jobs simultaneously. To address the effects of uncertain parameters, a fuzzy optimization method alongside the multi-objective gray wolf optimizer (MOGWO), non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II (NSGA-II), multi-objective differential evolution algorithm (MODEA), and ε-constraint are applied to optimize the model. Also, a case study of the pharmaceutical industry demonstrates the model's efficacy in a real-life context. The numerical results show the MOGWO manages to create high-quality Pareto solutions with a good spread at the Pareto boundary within a short time compared to the ε-constraint approach. Further, it has shown a more robust performance compared to MODEA and NSGA-II, indicating the efficiency of MOGWO, among other solution methods and other objective indicators.