A multi-objective model for multi-production and multi-echelon closed-loop pharmaceutical supply chain considering quality concepts: NSGAII approach

Abstract

Quality of medical and pharmaceutical products has a key role in healthcare systems such as hospitals for better services to patients. This study proposes a comprehensive multi-objective mathematical model in healthcare supply chain considering quality and green concepts. The proposed model includes three objective functions. The first minimizes total manufacturing costs including transportation; purchasing maintenance, deterioration, setup, recycling, collecting and disposal costs. The second maximizes quality level of production. The third minimizes environmental effects of the products and transportations. The proposed model is complicated because of its nature and listed in the NP-hard. Hence, we use NSGAII approach for solving this model. The numerical example illustrates steps of the solution method. The solution representation for 4 suppliers, 2 recycling centers and 3 productions shows for supplier 1 (1100, 600, 1000) and supplier 2 (1000, 900, 400), recycling center 2 has a good performance and for supplier 3 (700, 500, 800) and supplier 4 (400, 950, 0), recycling center 1 has a good performance. Then, we need to improve the performance of the rest recycling centers per supplier. To measure the capabilities of multi-objective meta-heuristics, we used Number of Pareto solutions, spacing metric and quality metric criteria. Finally, the results show that the proposed algorithm has high quality to solve the model.