Designing a mathematical model for dental tourism supply chain.

In recent decades, medical tourism has grown rapidly and has attracted much attention. This study investigates the design of a dental tourism supply chain network as one of the medical tourism subcategories, and for the first time, it presents a mathematical model for this supply chain. The proposed supply chain consists of three parts: tourists, medical facilities, and accommodation. The purpose of this model is to determine the optimal number of medical and accommodation units and the final capacity of medical centers. The proposed model is verified using a real case study in Mazandaran province, Iran. The obtained results show that the proposed model can be used for strategic planning and effective investment in this field. One of the important applications of this research is to provide suggestions for designing the proposed supply chain network using the outputs of the mathematical model. • A mathematical model for a dental tourism supply chain is proposed. • Three levels of dental tourism supply chain network were considered: medical centers, accommodation centers, and tourists. • Maximizing the profit of dental tourism supply chain is considered. • A real case study was considered for model validation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]