A Selective Covering-Inventory-Routing Problem to the Location of Bloodmobile to Supply Stochastic Demand of Blood

Supplying of blood and its products is one of the most challenging issues in the healthcare system since blood is a extremely perishable and vital good, and blood donation is a voluntary work. In this paper,a two-stage stochastic selective-covering-inventory-routing (SCIR) model was proposed to supply whole blood under uncertainty. Herein, a set of discrete scenarios was used to display uncertainty in stochastic parameters. Both of the fixed blood center and bloodmobile facilities were considered in this study. It was supposed that the number of bloodmobiles was indicated in the first stage before knowing which scenario occurred. To verify the validation of the presented SCIR model to supply the whole blood, the impact of parameters variation was examined on the model outputs and cost function using the CPLEX solver. In addition, the results ofcomparison between the stochastic approach and expected value approach were discussed.

Keywords:

Inventory-Routing , Covering problem , Selective Vehicle-Routing , Mobile BloodCollection