Aida Bitaraf - Department of Industrial Engineering, Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran
Seyyed Mohammad Taghi Fatemi Ghomi - Department of Industrial Engineering, Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran

Blood supply chains are crucial as this resource is essential for treatments involving surgeries and organ transplants. Time is critical in this supply chain , so this paper studies a vehicle routing problem with time windows to deliver blood products from a blood center to hospitals. Social and environmental sustainability dimensions are involved in the model. The main contribution is of proposing a mixed-integer linear programming model which integrates the vehicle routing problem with time windows and fleet planning decisions to decide whether new vehicles are required to decrease the amount of emission emitted to the environment or not. The problem is solved using LP-Metric method in GAMS with a CPLEX solver.

Sustainability; Blood Supply Chain; Fleet Planning; VRPTW