Supplier selection is one of the most critical problems in the industry. In the healthcare sector, where the tolerance level for mistakes and errors is low, the need to improve the supplier evaluation system is ever increasing. Earlier, the cardinal data-based mathematical models played an important role in supplier selection however since last few decades, the emphasis on the decision-making methods that can handle ordinal relations is gaining exceeding attention. The development of the Ordinal Priority Approach (OPA) is an essential milestone in this regard that is being used in the current study to evaluate the suppliers of a Chinese healthcare facility. The study confirms that the OPA is convenient and powerful approach that can single-handedly estimate the weights of suppliers, criteria and experts. The results demonstrated the feasibility and validity of the approach for healthcare supplier selection problems.

PurposeThis research studies a location-allocation problem considering the m/m/m/k queue model in the blood supply chain network. This supply chain includes three levels of suppliers or donors, main blood centers (laboratories for separation, storage and distribution centers) and demand centers (hospitals and private clinics). Moreover, the proposed model is a multi-objective model including minimizing the total cost of the blood supply chain (the cost of unmet demand and inventory spoilage, the cost of transport between collection centers and the main centers of blood), minimizing the waiting time of donors in blood donating mobile centers, and minimizing the establishment of mobile centers in potential places.Design/methodology/approachSince the problem is multi-objective and NP-Hard, the heuristic algorithm NSGA-II is proposed for Pareto solutions and then the estimation of the parameters of the algorithm is described using the design of experiments. According to the review of the previous research, there are a few pieces of research in the blood supply chain in the field of design queue models and there were few works that tried to use these concepts for designing the blood supply chain networks. Also, in former research, the uncertainty in the number of donors, and also the importance of blood donors has not been considered.FindingsA novel mathematical model guided by the theory of linear programming has been proposed that can help health-care administrators in optimizing the blood supply chain networks.Originality/valueBy building upon solid literature and theory, the current study proposes a novel model for improving the supply chain of blood.