Optimizing transportation for a centralized sterilization service in a multi-hospital network

In this paper, we deal with transportation services' configuration in the context of centralization of sterilization service for a multi-hospital network. We address the problem as a Multi-trip VRP with pickup and delivery, with time windows and release dates. The objective is to design logistics trips between the network of hospitals and the sterilization center to pick-up contaminated reusable medical devices and distribute sterile ones while minimizing the transportation costs. We propose a mixed integer programming model and provide numerical experiments on randomly generated instances. A sensitivity analysis regarding several parameters is provided and the performance of the proposed model is shown.