Abstract
Prescription demand and the complexity of patients’ pharmaceutical protocols have significantly increased during the last decade. To achieve greater effectiveness of the overall prescription fulfillment process, the development and deployment of modern pharmacy automation systems, known as mail order pharmacy (MOP) or central fill pharmacy (CFP) systems, have been accelerated in recent years. Such advanced systems adopted automated robotic dispensing systems (RDS) and collation systems that can prepare more than tens of thousands of prescriptions per day. Designing and operating large-scale pharmacy systems are very complicated and expensive to ensure their expected throughputs and patient safety consideration. Therefore, a thorough system evaluation and investigation for potential improvement regarding the performance and operational efficiency should be conducted. This chapter aims to provide the detailed working mechanisms of pharmacy automation systems and introduce five important optimization problems in pharmacy automation, which include the RDS planogram design optimization, RDS replenishment optimization, collation system analysis, order scheduling optimization, and pharmacy database mining. To better demonstrate the optimization modeling in the context of pharmacy automation, a case study of the RDS replenishment process optimization based on modeling and simulation approaches is presented. The chapter also provides several research and development directions, which can potentially facilitate the realization of smart pharmacy automation solutions in the era of Industrial 4.0.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Systems Collaboration and Integration |
| Subtitle of host publication | See Past and Future Research through the PRISM Center |
| Place of Publication | Cham |
| Publisher | Springer,Cham |
| Volume | 14 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 978-3-031-44373-2 |
| ISBN (Print) | 978-3-031-44372-5 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 18 Oct 2023 |