Designing the drone based end-to-end local supply chain distribution network

Abstract

People in rural areas suffer due to lack of proper health care specifically during the emergency condition. Ontime delivery of emergency lifesaving medicine at the remote area is a one of the major concerns and one of the major reasons for this cause is the negligence and lack of proper transportation and road infrastructure. In this paper we have proposed a mixed integer non-linear programming (MINLP) model that is based on drone delivery for end-to-end local supply chain distribution network to ensure the fastest possible delivery of lifesaving medicine at the remote area. Moreover, we have used the Dijkstra algorithm to find the shortest path to deliver the lifesaving medicine at the patient home location using drone. The objective of this paper is to design an end-to-end local supply chain network to minimize the total delivery lead time of the lifesaving medicines under emergencies conditions. Also, the proposed MINLP model help to select the optimal healthcare facility location to minimize the total delivery lead time.