## 1 Introduction
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c c} \hline \hline
**Reference** & **Real-Life Problem Settings** & **Conceptual Model** & **Mathematical Model** & **Real-World Settings Implementation/ Practical Validation** & **Software Solution** \\ \hline
[19] & & A five-echelon & & The application of & \\  & Optimization of & blood supply chain & A robust & the proposed model & \\  & the sustainable & network is & multi-echelon & is investigated in a & \\  & humanitarian & presented that & multi-objective & case problem in & The model is \\  & supply chain of & includes donors, & mixed integer & Tehran, where real & coded in GAMS \\  & blood products in & mobile, fixed and & linear & data is utilized to & and solved by \\  & Tehran. & regional blood & programming & design a network for & CPLEX solver. \\  & & collection centres, & optimization & emergency supply of & \\  & & and hospitals. & model. & blood during & \\  & & & potential disasters. & \\  & & & A multi-objective & & \\  & & & model & \\  & proposed & & fordesigning of a & The model is & \\  & sustainable & & pharmaceutical & validated in the & \\  & distribution & distribution & pharmaceutical & \\  & network model in & & network according & distribution & \\  & pharmaceutical & & to the main & company in Iran, & Not mentioned \\  & supply chain is & & concepts of & Darupakhsh & \\  & customized for a & & sustainability i.e., & Distribution & \\  & real case study in & & economic, & Company. & \\  & Iran. & & environmental and & \\  & & & social. & & \\  & A systems thinking & & & & \\  & and modelling & & & & \\  & methodology was & & & & \\  & used to explore the & & & & \\  & functioning of the & & & & \\  & reverse logistics & & & & \\  & process in the & & Dynamics. & No & \\  & Indian & & & & \\  & pharmaceutical & & & & \\  & industry, at a & & & \\  & strategic level. & & & & \\  & The considered & & & \\  & case study is based & & A fully-specified & A two-stage & The model is applied & to a case based on an \\  & on a & & case study research & & empirical study. \\  & emprehensive & & underpins the & addressing market & Only the market data \\  & & nine different & formulation of a & launch planning in & has been generated \\  & North European & & & & through random \\  & pharmaceutical & model of the PSC. & the pharmacist & industry. & sampling based on \\  & companies. & & & \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 1: _Cont._Starting from this point, the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents an overview of related research, concerning multi-echelon pharmaceutical supply chain management, centralized or decentralized network design, distribution planning and control systems, with emphasis on the distribution requirements planning approach (DRP), fixed order quantity (FOQ) and lot for lot (LFL) lot-sizing rules. Additionally, this section tackles the novelty of the study against the existing literature in the field. Section 3 outlines the problem description, while the methodology including modern control theory concept used for the conceptual model definition, system dynamics modelling and discrete-time system control, is addressed in Section 4. The mathematical model, assumptions and notation are presented in Section 5. Section 6 refers to the model implementation and Section 5 to the sensitivity analysis and numerical results. Finally, the last section relates to the conclusions, a summary of all the above-mentioned content, and future work directions.