Performance Evaluation of Automated Medicine Delivery Systems

Wanying Chen; Rene de Koster; Y (Yeming) Gong

doi:10.1016/j.tre.2021.102242

Performance Evaluation of Automated Medicine Delivery Systems

Wanying Chen
, Rene de Koster
, Y (Yeming) Gong

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › Academic › peer-review

16 Citations (Scopus)

84 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

The daily medicine delivery is one of the most important activities in hospitals. The traditional medicine delivery, from hospital warehouses to the patients, typically involves a human delivery team supplying patients by handcarts. The multiple steps in the medicine delivery process impact the efficiency and increase the risk of contamination. Many hospitals are therefore on their way to automate this process. The Telelift-based automated medicine delivery system provides high health safety, low operational cost, and high system efficiency. This paper develops a stochastic model to evaluate and analyze the medicine delivery process by such an automated medicine delivery system. We adopt a two-moment approximation method and an aggregation approximation algorithm to solve the nested queuing model, considering regular and peak demand. We use simulation to validate the analytical model. The numerical experiments show that our analytical model is sufficiently accurate to evaluate the automated medicine delivery process. Our model can help decision makers of hospitals to reduce the patient waiting time and medicine response time. Our method can also be extended to other automated overhead material handling systems.

Original language	English
Article number	102242
Pages (from-to)	102242
Journal	Transportation Research. Part E, The Logistics and Transportation Review
Volume	147
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tre.2021.102242
Publication status	Published - Mar 2021

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This research was supported in part by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 72001189 ), NSFC Key Project (Grant No. 71620107002 ), National Social Science Foundation of China (NSSFC) Major Project (Grant No. 16ZDA013 ), Zhejiang Natural Science Foundation (Grant No. LQ19G030004 ), Qianjiang River Talent Scholarship (Grant No. QJC1802002 ), Zhejiang Gongshang University (Grant No. 1310XJ0518003 ), Qianjiang New Area and Wahaha Group. Yeming Gong is partially supported by Business Intelligence Center (BIC) and Shanghai campus of EMLYON.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Elsevier Ltd

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1-s2.0-S136655452100020X-mainFinal published version, 3.99 MBLicence: Article 25fa Dutch Copyright Act

Cite this

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title = "Performance Evaluation of Automated Medicine Delivery Systems",

abstract = "The daily medicine delivery is one of the most important activities in hospitals. The traditional medicine delivery, from hospital warehouses to the patients, typically involves a human delivery team supplying patients by handcarts. The multiple steps in the medicine delivery process impact the efficiency and increase the risk of contamination. Many hospitals are therefore on their way to automate this process. The Telelift-based automated medicine delivery system provides high health safety, low operational cost, and high system efficiency. This paper develops a stochastic model to evaluate and analyze the medicine delivery process by such an automated medicine delivery system. We adopt a two-moment approximation method and an aggregation approximation algorithm to solve the nested queuing model, considering regular and peak demand. We use simulation to validate the analytical model. The numerical experiments show that our analytical model is sufficiently accurate to evaluate the automated medicine delivery process. Our model can help decision makers of hospitals to reduce the patient waiting time and medicine response time. Our method can also be extended to other automated overhead material handling systems.",

author = "Wanying Chen and \{de Koster\}, Rene and Gong, \{Y (Yeming)\}",

note = "Funding Information: This research was supported in part by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 72001189 ), NSFC Key Project (Grant No. 71620107002 ), National Social Science Foundation of China (NSSFC) Major Project (Grant No. 16ZDA013 ), Zhejiang Natural Science Foundation (Grant No. LQ19G030004 ), Qianjiang River Talent Scholarship (Grant No. QJC1802002 ), Zhejiang Gongshang University (Grant No. 1310XJ0518003 ), Qianjiang New Area and Wahaha Group. Yeming Gong is partially supported by Business Intelligence Center (BIC) and Shanghai campus of EMLYON. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2021 Elsevier Ltd",

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AU - Chen, Wanying

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N2 - The daily medicine delivery is one of the most important activities in hospitals. The traditional medicine delivery, from hospital warehouses to the patients, typically involves a human delivery team supplying patients by handcarts. The multiple steps in the medicine delivery process impact the efficiency and increase the risk of contamination. Many hospitals are therefore on their way to automate this process. The Telelift-based automated medicine delivery system provides high health safety, low operational cost, and high system efficiency. This paper develops a stochastic model to evaluate and analyze the medicine delivery process by such an automated medicine delivery system. We adopt a two-moment approximation method and an aggregation approximation algorithm to solve the nested queuing model, considering regular and peak demand. We use simulation to validate the analytical model. The numerical experiments show that our analytical model is sufficiently accurate to evaluate the automated medicine delivery process. Our model can help decision makers of hospitals to reduce the patient waiting time and medicine response time. Our method can also be extended to other automated overhead material handling systems.

AB - The daily medicine delivery is one of the most important activities in hospitals. The traditional medicine delivery, from hospital warehouses to the patients, typically involves a human delivery team supplying patients by handcarts. The multiple steps in the medicine delivery process impact the efficiency and increase the risk of contamination. Many hospitals are therefore on their way to automate this process. The Telelift-based automated medicine delivery system provides high health safety, low operational cost, and high system efficiency. This paper develops a stochastic model to evaluate and analyze the medicine delivery process by such an automated medicine delivery system. We adopt a two-moment approximation method and an aggregation approximation algorithm to solve the nested queuing model, considering regular and peak demand. We use simulation to validate the analytical model. The numerical experiments show that our analytical model is sufficiently accurate to evaluate the automated medicine delivery process. Our model can help decision makers of hospitals to reduce the patient waiting time and medicine response time. Our method can also be extended to other automated overhead material handling systems.

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DO - 10.1016/j.tre.2021.102242

M3 - Article

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JO - Transportation Research. Part E, The Logistics and Transportation Review

JF - Transportation Research. Part E, The Logistics and Transportation Review

M1 - 102242

ER -

Performance Evaluation of Automated Medicine Delivery Systems

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