The nuclear medicine production and delivery problem

Jongsung Lee, Byung-In Kim, Andrew Johnson and Kiho Lee

European Journal of Operational Research, 2014, vol. 236, issue 2, 461-472

Abstract: Half-life is a unique characteristic of radioactive substances used in a variety of medical treatments. Radioisotope F-18 used for diagnosing and monitoring many types of cancers has a half-life of 110minutes. As such, it requires careful coordination of production and delivery by manufacturers and medical end-users. To model this critical production and delivery problem, we develop a mixed integer program and propose a variant of a large neighborhood search algorithm with various improvement algorithms. We conduct several computational experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The method when applied in a case study shows that improvement in terms of both time and cost is possible in the production and delivery of F-18.

Keywords: Routing; Nuclear medicine; Half-life; Production and delivery; Vehicle routing; Large neighborhood search (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377221713010084
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:236:y:2014:i:2:p:461-472

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2013.12.024

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Operational Research is currently edited by Roman Slowinski, Jesus Artalejo, Jean-Charles. Billaut, Robert Dyson and Lorenzo Peccati

More articles in European Journal of Operational Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().