Joint Decisions for Blood Collection and Platelet Inventory Control

Abstract

The present study investigates the benefit of joint decision making regarding whole blood collection and platelet production at a blood center. We consider a blood center that faces two types of platelet demands, differing in their freshness requirements and shortage penalty costs. We fully characterize the structure of the optimal policy regarding whole blood collection, platelet production, and inventory issuing, rationing and disposal. We find that the optimal platelet production quantity in each period is nonincreasing in the inventory levels of platelets and whole blood but that interestingly, the optimal blood collection effort may increase with the on‐hand platelet inventory level. We demonstrate with a real dataset that joint decision making leads to significant cost savings compared with separate decision making. The benefit is mainly derived from reduced blood collection and platelet production, better utilization of the collected whole blood, and reduced platelet shortage. For practical implementation, we develop a lookahead heuristic, which is shown to be very effective by numerical experiments.

A novel capacity sharing mechanism to collaborative activities in the blood collection process during the COVID-19 outbreak

“…Chen et al. [33] developed a dynamic programming model for a joint decision-making problem of blood collection and platelet inventory control based on different demand priorities and freshness requirements. The model’s practicality is validated by the real data obtained from most countries, especially the developing ones.…”

Heuristic-based allocation of supply constrained blood platelets in emerging economies

“…All three studies introduce age-based replenishment policies and emphasizes the age of the platelet inventory while inferring the performance of the suggested policy. Recently, Chen et al (2019) argued that the demand for platelets is increasing and the supply of whole blood, from which platelets are produced, are declining in Hong Kong and Australia. They model the joint decision of blood collection and platelet production considering supply as a function of whole blood collection.…”

“…Recently, Chen et al. ( 2019 ) argued that the demand for platelets is increasing and the supply of whole blood, from which platelets are produced, are declining in Hong Kong and Australia. They model the joint decision of blood collection and platelet production considering supply as a function of whole blood collection.…”

Optimisation and control of the supply of blood bags in hemotherapic centres via Markov decision process with discounted arrival rate

“…Indeed, an analytical treatment of the expressions derived from models with two or more switch-overs is close to impracticable. More recently, stochastic optimisation models have also been applied that consider fixed shelf lives (Puranam et al, 2017;Chen et al, 2019), but the former work only considers shelf lives of at most two days, whereas the latter gives rise to a complex model that becomes rapidly intractable for all but very small shelf lives and hence seeks approximate solutions using heuristic procedures. Furthermore, both models generate myopic open-loop controls for fixed time horizons.…”

“…In addition, the proposed model explicitly considers perishability and remains computationally tractable regardless of the shelf life. Such a powerful result is made possible because perishability is addressed by differentiating between useful and potentially expired blood bags, instead of keeping track of the expiration dates of all items in stock, which would render the model intractable (e.g., Chen et al, 2019). The approach, which was inspired by the analogy between impatient clients on a M/M/1 queue and the blood bag expiration in (Kaspi and Perry, 1983), discounts the probability that an incoming blood bag will expire before being distributed, as detailed in section 4.…”