خلاصة:
Management of the blood as a vital and scarce resource is very important. The aim of this research is to present a novel mathematical model for designing a reliable blood supply chain network. This network consists of three main echelons including donors, collection facilities and demand points. At the collection echelon, three types of facilities are considered for receiving the bloods from the donors: main blood centers (MBCs), demountable collection centers (DCCs), and mobile blood facilities (MBFs). DCCs, and MBFs are mobile facilities that don’t have a permanent location and always move from a location to another one for collecting the bloods from the donors. The main difference between the MBFs and DCCs is that the DCCs can only visit at most a candidate location every period, but the MBFs can visit more than one candidate location in every period. Also, there is differences between their capacities and their costs. Both of DCCs and MBFs dispatch the collected bloods to the MBCs that are permanent facilities and are responsible for receiving the bloods and performing the blood transfusion process and finally sending the bloods to the demand points. Using a numerical example, the applicability of the proposed network is analyzed.
ملخص الجهاز:
Collection of blood, processing of it in the labs and finally dispatching the produced blood products to the demand points are the main activities in the blood supply chain networks.
The aim of this research is to present a mathematical programming model in order to design a novel blood supply chain network such that the important problem of collecting blood from the donors is taken into account by considering three ways for collection of blood including mobile collection centers demountable collection centers as temporary facilities and main blood centers as permanent facilities.
The echelons of the proposed network consist of donors, mobile collection centers, demountable collection centers, main blood centers and hospitals.
2. The problem The proposed blood supply chain includes donors, mobile collection units, demountable collection centers, main blood centers and hospitals.
3. Evaluation of the model In the following and in order to evaluate the applicability of the proposed blood supply chain network, a numerical example is presented in this section.
The results of implementing the example are shown in Tables 2 that contains the number of mobile collection units and the number of demountable collection centres used in every period, also the total cost of the supply chain network.
The differences between demountable collection centers and mobile blood facilities were in their capacity and costs and also the number of locations that each of them can visit in every period.
Also, the optimal cost of adopting these collection centers in the proposed blood supply chain network was calculated.