Designing a Decision Support System for Estimating the Retailer’s Demand for Cancer Drugs

Cancer drugs and the process of manufacturing these drugs are complicated and costly. In addition, these drugs are among the vital drugs, hence the necessity for their availability to patients. Therefore, we decided to create a decision support system that estimates the number of cancer drugs needed for patients during certain periods by minimizing the marginal cost. This decision support system is appropriate for predicting, not making decisions instead of humans. We illustrated its pharmaceutical supply chain and we modeled the problem as a mathematical model to solve this problem. The innovation of this article is to create a decision model for a pharmaceutical supply chain that can be the basis for creating a decision support system. Also, this flexible supply chain can be changed according to the user s needs. Finally, we solved the problem in Excel using the Solver library. This decision support system gets the values of the indices from the user and creates a supply chain in proportion to the user’s need. Data provided by Alborz Pharmed Company was used to test this decision support system. The model results revealed the strategic and management decisions made in the distribution network of Regorafenib in Tehran.

Keywords:

pharmaceutical supply chain , cancer pharmaceutical manufacturing , linear programming , distribution network , supply chain decision support system