Scheduling the distribution of blood products in the presence of accident risk

Blood is an essential and scarce resource that humans are the only of its producers with no substitution. Due to the unique nature of blood, including perishability, the impossibility of long-term storage, etc. effective and efficient management of the blood supply chain is essential. This paper formulates the distribution of blood products applying a vendor-managed inventory routing problem approach in which the blood center monitors the inventory of each hospital and determines its replenishment policy as a bi-objective mixed-integer programming model. The first objective function minimizes the total operational costs and the second one minimizes the maximum cost of the accident among all periods. Then a numerical example is given to explain how the model works. All optimal solutions are provided with CPLEX software

Keywords:

Blood supply chain , Inventory routing problem , Accident risk