ABSTRACT
The widespread outbreak of a new Coronavirus (COVID-19) strain has reminded the world of the destructive effects of pandemic and epidemic diseases. Pandemic outbreaks such as COVID-19 are considered a type of risk to supply chains (SCs) affecting SC performance. Healthcare SC performance can be assessed using advanced Management Science (MS) and Operations Research (OR) approaches to improve the efficiency of existing healthcare systems when confronted by pandemic outbreaks such as COVID-19 and Influenza. This paper intends to develop a novel network range directional measure (RDM) approach for evaluating the sustainability and resilience of healthcare SCs in response to the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak. First, we propose a non-radial network RDM method in the presence of negative data. Then, the model is extended to deal with the different types of data such as ratio, integer, undesirable, and zero in efficiency measurement of sustainable and resilient healthcare SCs. To mitigate conditions of uncertainty in performance evaluation results, we use chance-constrained programming (CCP) for the developed model. The proposed approach suggests how to improve the efficiency of healthcare SCs. We present a case study, along with managerial implications, demonstrating the applicability and usefulness of the proposed model. The results show how well our proposed model can assess the sustainability and resilience of healthcare supply chains in the presence of dissimilar types of data and how, under different conditions, the efficiency of decision-making units (DMUs) changes.
ABSTRACT
Blood supply chains (BSCs) play a strategic and crucial role in healthcare systems especially in unexpected situations such as earthquakes and pandemic outbreaks. Nevertheless, measuring the sustainability and resilience of BSCs is a major challenge for many decision-makers in healthcare systems. To this end, this paper presents an advanced network data envelopment analysis (NDEA) method to evaluate the sustainability and resilience of BSCs. We deal with BSCs, including blood collection centers (BCCs), blood production centers (BPCs), and blood distribution centers (BDCs). A new directional distance function (DDF) is also developed for evaluating both the overall and stage efficiency scores. Our proposed model can deal with different types of data, including integers, undesirable outputs, negative, zero, and positive. The undesirable outputs are the outputs that adversely impact the performance of DMUs. Moreover, the developed method addresses the sustainability and resilience of BSCs. A case study is provided to demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed model.