Cooperative policies for drug replenishment at Intensive Care Units

This paper addresses the effects of lateral transshipment within a drug inventory policy in a real case-study involving two Intensive Care Units. An extension of a previous developed integer linear programming model is proposed, which decides when, what and how much to order, ensuring orders regularity. Preliminary results on realistic instances suggest the potential advantage in terms of reduction of order occurrences while using excess stock efficiently and profitably. This analysis is a first step towards the introduction of the cooperative model within an optimization-simulation tool deployed in a rolling-horizon framework.