Fuzzy Programming Approach for Collaborative Supply Chain under Uncertain Demand

Abstract

Nowadays, improving the performance of the hospital supply chain became increasingly important. Therefore, healthcare organizations strive to optimize operational efficiency and reduce costs. In this paper, we propose a linear programming model to optimize the allocation of material resources (products) to the healthcare establishments within a “Territorial Hospital Group (THG)”. This cooperation among hospitals presents a new form of horizontal collaboration in order to ensure the pooling of stores/pharmacies and minimize logistics costs. Besides, in real-world applications, parameters such as demands and costs could be quite imprecise or uncertain. Moreover, we address in our work uncertainty related to the demands of care units/hospitals due to unusual or unforeseen conditions. This uncertain parameter is modeled as a triangular fuzzy number and we propose a fuzzy linear programming model to solve using the weighted average method for the defuzzification stage. The efficiency of the proposed model is tested over a set of generated instances. The obtained results prove the importance of horizontal collaboration and uncertainty handling.