The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on hospitals and healthcare systems around the world. The cost of business disruption combined with lingering COVID-19 costs has placed many public hospitals on a course to insolvency. To quickly return to financial stability, hospitals should implement efficiency measure. An average technical efficiency (ATE) model made up of data envelopment analysis (DEA) and stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) for assessing efficiency in public hospitals during and after the COVID-19 pandemic is offered. The DEA method is a non-parametric method that requires no information other than the input and output quantities. SFA is a parametric method that considers stochastic noise in data and allows statistical testing of hypotheses about production structure and degree of inefficiency. The rationale for using these two competing approaches is to balance each method’s strengths, weaknesses and introduce a novel integrated approach. To show the applicability and efficacy of the proposed hybrid VRS-CRS-SFA (VCS) model, a case study is presented.

In this paper, we present an integrated multi-objective framework of a single machine for a single cutting tool problem. Our maintenance policy is based on performing minimal repairs in case of a minor failure and Preventive Maintenance (PM) to avoid a major failure that results in the replacement of the tool. This framework allows simultaneous optimization of the two conflicting time and cost objectives. A redundant system is proposed as a part of the model to assist the production line under a major failure. In addition, the tool’s preventive maintenance time is synchronized with the completion of the machine tool’s work cycle to reduce the machine’s set-up time. The model was optimized using a customized Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm (NSGA-II). An experimental study based on real-market data was conducted and the results were compared with the ones obtained from classical methods.

Recent developments in urbanization and e-commerce have pushed businesses to deploy efficient systems to decrease their supply chain cost. Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) is one of the most widely used strategies to effectively manage supply chains with multiple parties. VMI implementation asks for solving the Inventory Routing Problem (IRP). This study considers a multi-product multi-period inventory routing problem, including a supplier, set of customers, and a fleet of heterogeneous vehicles. Due to the complex nature of the IRP, we developed a Modified Adaptive Genetic Algorithm (MAGA) to solve a variety of instances efficiently. As a benchmark, we considered the results obtained by Cplex software and an efficient heuristic from the literature. Through extensive computational experiments on a set of randomly generated instances, and using different metrics, we show that our approach distinctly outperforms the other two methods.