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Top1. Introduction
Hard competition is increasingly forcing pharmacies to adopt different technologies such as the use of the medicine automated dispensing system. These systems offer various advantages such as: fast dispensing and stocking rates, managing inventory and controlling medication expiration date. The delivery time is a key factor for drug distribution to meet the customer request. For this, a modern automated material-handling technology for the drug distribution based on a free-fall-flow-rack automated storage and retrieval system (FF-flow-rack AS/RS) has been devlopped for use in pharmacy. This system is known by the trade name “APOTEKA.”
As stated by the Material Handling Institute of America, an automated storage and retrieval system (AS/RS) is a generic term that today refers to a variety of means under computer control for automatically depositing and retrieving loads from defined storage locations (MHI, 2018).
The AS / RS are used in warehouses and consist of multiple parts, such as storage racks, aisles, storage and retrieval (S / R) machines, pickup / delivery (P / D) stations, that are all controlled by a computer system. The racks contain several bins that can store items. The racks are separated from each other by aisles. The storage and retrieval machines are fully automated cranes that move along an aisle to pick up and retrieve loads. The Pickup / Delivery (P / D) stations are used for inbound and outbound loads. The control system is used to manage the storage and retrieval operations.
The major types of ASRS are: AS / RS unit load, AS / RS mini load, AS / RS man-to-edge, AS / RS carousel, AS / RS multi-aisle, AS / RS support mobile, and AS-RS (deep-lane AS / RS).
The majority of papers in the literature dealing with automated dispensing systems have focused in evaluating the impact of these systems on reducing dispensing errors (Fanning et al., 2016) (Hoffman and Proulx, 2003) (Hyland al al., 2007) (Oswald and Caldwell, 2007) (Pedersen at al., 2015) (Serrano et al., 2012). Some researchers have studied the economic impact of the introduction of automated dispensing systems (Chapuis et al., 2015) (Risør et al., 2018). In this article, we are interested in time savings that an automated dispensing system can generate in a pharmacy.
The main contribution of this paper is to propose a comparative study between manual and automated drug-distribution in term of the total retrieval time of customer request. We performed this comparison in order to highlight the several and the major benefits of using a free-fall flow-rack automated storage and retrieval system for the automating of the drug distribution in the pharmacies. In this paper, we study the issue of dispensing drugs in the pharmacies where the prescribed drugs are full medicine box (SKU), which this method of drug dispensing is the most used in Europe and Africa.
The rest of this paper is as follows. In section 2 the automated distribution (FF-flow-rack AS/RS) and is described. In section 3 the manual distribution is presented. The retrieval-travel-time models are developed in section 4. Section 5 shows the obtained results of the comparison between the manual and automated distribution. The conclusion is reported in Section 6.