Supply chain design under quality disruptions and tainted materials delivery

Events such as the 2008 Heparin tragedy, in which patients lost their lives due to tainted pharmaceuticals, highlight the necessity for supply chain designers and planners to consider the risk of even low probability incidents in supply chains. The goal of this research is to design a single-period, single-product supply chain model with capacitated facilities to hedge against the possibility of sending tainted materials to consumers. Given that our mixed-integer stochastic model is NP-hard, we develop efficient heuristic and metaheuristic algorithms to obtain acceptable solutions. Computational experience is presented and discussed. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.