Document Type : Research Note
Authors
Faculty of Industrial Engineering Shiraz University of Technology
10.24200/j65.2023.59545.2271
Abstract
Adequate blood supply plays an essential role in the management of health systems, and the cost of blood supply and its derivatives is an important part of community health expenditures. Due to the lack of alternatives to blood, its production only by humans, and its non-production by chemical processes, designing an efficient and effective blood supply chain seems necessary. In this paper, a multi-level and multi-period mixed integer programming model is provided for designing the blood supply chain considering donors, hospitals, temporary centers, and laboratories. In mathematical modeling, the goals of sustainable development are considered to minimize supply chain costs, minimize
greenhouse gas emissions, and maximize job opportunities created by the establishment of facilities. Using the proposed model, several decisions are made including the location of facilities, the blood flow between different levels of the supply chain, inventory level, deficiency, and the number of donors according to restrictions related to coverage radius, budget, and the expiration of blood. Due to the uncertain nature of the parameters in the real world, the uncertainty of the key parameters of the blood supply chain such as blood demand, costs of systems, wastes, and budget are considered. To deal with the uncertainty, the chance-constrained fuzzy programming approach is used. Ultimately, a case study is presented to show the effectiveness of the model. The proposed model can provide a suitable tool for health department managers in making operational and strategic decisions on blood supply chain levels by optimizing all three dimensions of sustainability. Numerical results confirm
the effectiveness of the proposed model and show that the uncertain nature of the parameters of the proposed model cannot be ignored because the costs of the system, the harmful environmental effects, and the positive social effects are significantly affected by the uncertainty. Also, the results obtained from solving the mathematical model show that when the level of uncertainty is increased, to meet the demand, it is necessary to establish more temporary facilities to increase blood supply and reduce its shortage.
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