Modelo para a integração de decisões de localização e transporte na distribuição de medicamentos

Abstract

Medicines are sensitive products to environmental factors, especially temperature and humidity. Pharmaceutical logistics must be well planned and executed, in order to ensure the preservation of products and provide the highest customer service levels. Logistic planning begins with the facilities location decision, such as production plants and distribution centers. The plants location is very long-term decision because it requires high investment of capital, time and technology, as well as licenses of sanitary and governmental entities. However, the distribution centers location is more flexible because services for pharmaceutical sector of specialized logistics operators can be hired. These logistic operators have distribution center structures that can be shared among several companies, offering lower logistics costs and flexibility in planning distribution networks. Transport and inventory management decisions, although they are tactical and operational level decisions, they have potential to significantly impact the network performance, therefore should be considered in planning from the beginning. In this context, this work focuses on the planning of the medicines distribution network, proposing a mathematical programming model to support the distribution centers location decision (selection existing sites of the logistic operator) and tactical decisions of transport, more specifically, product flow; modal, freight types and vehicle types selection; and use of escorts in cargo transportation. In the model are considered particular network characteristics, such as conservation of cold chain products and security dealings for the cargo transportation, as well as characteristics of the Brazilian tax context associated with the Tax of Circulation of Goods and Services (ICMS). The proposed model was analyzed based on the real data simplification of a multinational company of pharmaceutical sector. Due to the dimension of the problem, the K-means method was used for product aggregation in families and also the aggregation of demand in the planning horizon was studied, in order to achieve a suitable trade-off between the computational treatability and the practical problem representativeness. The integration of location and transportation decisions presents better results, in terms of logistic cost and ICMS amount payable, compared to a non-integrated approach of the decisions. The results show that the model adequately represents the decisions of the problem and therefore it has the potential to support the decision making process of pharmaceutical distribution network planning.