Selective vehicle routing for a mobile blood donation system

Abstract

a b s t r a c tIn this study, a mobile blood collection system is designed with the primary objective of increasing blood collection levels. This design also takes into account operational costs to aim for collection of large amounts of blood at reasonable cost. Bloodmobiles perform direct tours to certain activities to collect blood, but at the end of each day, they bring the collected blood to a designated depot to prevent its spoilage. The proposed system consists of the bloodmobiles and a new vehicle called the shuttle that visits the bloodmobiles in the field on each day and transfers the collected blood to the depot. Consequently, bloodmobiles can continue their tours without having to make daily returns to the depot.We propose a mathematical model and a 2-stage IP based heuristic algorithm to determine the tours of the bloodmobiles and the shuttle, and their lengths of stay at each stop. This new problem is defined as an extension of the Selective Vehicle Routing Problem and is referred to as the SVRP with Integrated Tours. The performances of the solution methodologies are tested first on a real data set obtained from past blood donation activities of Turkish Red Crescent in Ankara, and then on a constructed data set based on GIS data of the European part of Istanbul. The Pareto set of optimum solutions is generated based on blood amounts and logistics costs, and finally a sensitivity analysis on some important design parameters is conducted.

Re-design of a blood supply chain organization with mobile units

“…Ensafian et al ( 2017 ), Ensafian and Yaghoubi ( 2017 ), Osorio et al ( 2017 ), Hosseinifard and Abbasi ( 2018 ), Clay et al ( 2018 ), Hosseinifard et al ( 2020 ) can be shown as recent examples. In addition, Ghandforoush and Sen ( 2010 ), Şahinyazan et al ( 2015 ), Blake et al ( 2015 ), Gunpinar and Centeno ( 2016 ), Elalouf et al ( 2018 ) focus on the logistics of blood products in the supply chain. The status of the blood supply chain network design and optimization after any disaster and emergency situations is also a sub-area.…”

“…These two assumptions are commonly made in the literature (i.e., Ensafian and Yaghoubi ( 2017 ), Arvan et al ( 2015 ), Şahinyazan et al ( 2015 ), Jabbarzadeh et al ( 2014 )). Hence, we also resort to homogeneity assumptions.…”

A location-allocation model for quality-based blood supply chain under IER uncertainty

“…Salehipour and Sepehri [41] dealt with blood distribution management to minimize total waiting time of hospitals and medical centers and tackled a real problem containing 24 hospitals. Şahinyazan et al [40] examined how blood from mobile centers is collected and sent to blood banks. They considered a vehicle for each district to move from a blood bank, collect donated blood from temporary centers, and then return to the same blood bank.…”

Modeling of the collections process in the blood supply chain: A literature review

“…deciding the location of both mobile and fixed donation clinics, and often also attempt to minimise the costs involved with moving clinics and transportation of blood products. The next most popular area of research within this category is the planning of clinics, such as the explicit scheduling of clinics at locations that are already assigned [2,45]. Several articles in this category either focus on relocating or establishing a new facility such as a blood centre or stock holding unit [10,16,29,44], whilst the comparison of effectiveness of mobile and fixed clinics is also considered [3].…”