Designing a bi-objective, multi-product supply chain network for blood supply

Abstract

During the past few years, operations research applications in health care operation management have grown quickly. On the other hand blood as a perishable, valuable and lifesaving product is one important asset of any healthcare center. Therefore, designing a blood supply network comes to importance. It also should be noted that a blood supply chain comprises specific modifications. This study intends to locate blood bank components in a network, and to determine the allocations among the network components. The supply chain components considered in this study are donation sites, testing and processing labs, blood banks, and demand points. It is known that demand centers such as hospitals and clinics highly depend on blood products and any deficiency in procurement can even result in a person’s death. Thus, in the last layer of the considered network a transshipment sub-network is considered between demand points. Most of the intricacies in problem formulation of blood supply chain are regarded in this study; cases such as blood wastage, blood product decomposition in lab facilities, and transshipments between demand points. Due to the fact that for such an important and lifesaving supply chain the aim would go beyond minimizing cost, another objective function is presented for the problem. Hence, to obtain a Pareto solution for both objective functions ∊-constraint method is utilized. Finally, to demonstrate the applicability of the problem, the model is implemented on a number of problem sets.