Orphan drug logistics

Abstract

"Orphan drugs" are medical products that are developed to treat orphan diseases. Since they are required by a small number of population, the pharmaceutical industry is not interested much in them. Hence they are produced in small amounts and they are difficult to attain. Moreover, patients may need them urgently. There are regulations for the transportation of orphan drugs to the patient. Those regulations differ among the countries. In this thesis, we focus on the logistics of the orphan drugs motivated by the application in Turkey. We analyze the implementation dynamics of Turkey and define related Operational Research (OR) problems. The overall problem can be considered as an application of locationrouting problem. We identify four performance measures based on urgency and ambulance scarcity. The primal aim in the current system is to serve the patient in need at short notice. Therefore, the minimization of the total distance is chosen to be the first performance measure. However, due to scarcity of ambulances in each city, the total extra disturbance, the maximum extra disturbance and the total number of cities disturbed are also analyzed. The problem includes multi-criteria optimization and the -constraint method is used to analyze the Pareto-optimal solutions. Turkey case is considered for computational analysis.