Optimisation models and information sharing in a multi-echelon pharmaceutical supply chain

This paper deals with the pharmaceutical supply chain management. We consider the case of the multi-echelon Tunisian pharmaceutical supply chain that is composed of one central pharmacy, multi-regional pharmacies, and multi-hospitals. We provide two mathematical models to reduce the whole supply chain cost, in particular the cost of shortage that highly affects the quality of service in the healthcare sector. In the first mathematical model, we optimise the current Tunisian pharmaceutical supply chain with information sharing only between the central pharmacy and the regional pharmacies, and in the second model, we consider an extension of the information sharing to cover all the supply chain members. Numerical results show the impact of the information sharing in cost saving by more than 14% on average.