A hybrid ANN-MILP model for agile recovery production planning for PPE products under sharp demands

Today, supply chains (SCs) have been struggling with a new type of disruption known as outbreaks such as epidemics or pandemics. This type of disruption has features such as long-term and uncertain lifespan and leads to severe fluctuations in product demand. This paper elaborates on a hybrid approach based on artificial neural networks (ANN) and mathematical programming techniques to efficiently deal with this type of disruption in the production planning of SCs. In the first phase of the hybrid approach, a multi-layer perceptron ANN model with an optimised structure is developed to efficiently predict the demand and its peak points. In the second phase, the predicted demands are considered as input in a new multiobjective agile recovery production planning model. The proposed model minimises total costs and delivery times and maximises responsiveness. A real case study in Iran is conducted to verify and validate the proposed hybrid approach. The prediction error of the ANN method is about 1 percent. According to the predicted demand, optimal decisions are determined by the proposed model. The impact of under-estimation and over-estimation of demand is evaluated in terms of total costs, delivery time, responsiveness and shortage costs in the SCs.