An application of chance-constrained model predictive control to inventory management in Hospitalary Pharmacy

Inventory management is one of the main tasks that the pharmacy department has to carry out in a hospital. It is a complex problem that requires to establish a tradeoff between different and contradictory optimization criteria. The complexity of the problem is increased due to the constraints that naturally arise in this type of applications. In this paper, which corresponds to preliminary works performed to implement advanced control techniques for pharmacy management in two Spanish hospitals, we propose and assess chance-constrained model predictive control (CC-MPC) as a mean to relieve this issue.