Optimizing warehousing and transportation for a network of healthcare institutions: case of Territorial Hospital Group in France

ABSTRACT This study deals with the warehousing and the transportation of products in a network of healthcare institutions. The general problem is rich location routing problem (LRP) considering demands of multiproducts to be allocated to a set of potential depots and a set of products to be delivered to healthcare institutions, while pickups and deliveries are from and to depots and healthcare institutions at the same time. One parking for vehicles is considered in the network, and each route starts and ends at the parking. A mixed integer linear programming is provided as a tool for the decision-maker to choose the best pooling configuration and decide the degree of flexibility of problem parameters such as time window length for demands, heterogeneity of the depots and vehicles, location of the depots and their capacities, etc., with the objective to save warehousing and transportation costs for the whole network.