A real-time replenishment policy for medicine supply chain in a hospital pharmacy

Hospital pharmacies receive thousands of prescriptions per day, so they must be able to meet patients’ needs at all times. It is, therefore, essential that the medication circuit at the hospital be as optimal as possible. Because of various aspects such as the life cycle of drugs, demand uncertainty, and space limits, supply chain management in hospitals is extremely difficult. In this research, the real-time inventory replenishment policy of a pharmacy in a general hospital is investigated. The goal of this research is to determine the optimal minimum/maximum replenishment policy. To address this problem, a mixed-integer linear programming optimization model based on the care unit’s features is proposed and solved with the rolling-horizon algorithm for a single care unit in the hospital.