A two-stage approach to agile pharmaceutical supply chain management with product substitutability in crises

Natural disasters refer to a set of harmful incidents, which do not originate in humans and threaten human lives around the world. These incidents are usually unpredictable. While most natural disasters appear to be beyond human control, the damage they cause can be controlled significantly. This is directly related to the human pre-emptive action, in particular designing and managing an efficient and constant scheduling in order to provide the required pharmaceutical materials. This paper addresses crisis management in pharmaceutical supply chains, whose three objective functions are to minimize the network total cost, minimize the unmet demand and maximize the satisfaction of social responsibility. In addition, it considers perishability and substitutability with demand uncertainty. Furthermore, two approaches, i.e. TH and Me, are used to handle the multi-objective model and uncertainty. Finally, a case study is presented to validate the mathematical model. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.