Track: Sustainability in Supply Chains and Operations

Abstract

The mobile collection system of blood products is considered in this study. Blood centers often use bloodmobiles that park near crowded places where donors can donate blood directly. We propose the use of additional vehicles, called shuttles, that pick up the collected blood by the bloodmobiles. Hence, bloodmobiles can continue their tours without having to return to the blood center. The system manager must decide the set of sites to visit by the bloodmobiles among a group of potential sites, and to determine the tours of the vehicles responsible for this operation. In this paper, the blood mobile collection system is modelled as a vehicle routing problem with profits. The objective is to minimize the total routing, wastage and shortage costs. Each collection site has a random potential blood quantity that is modeled as a stochastic profit which can be collected by a vehicle when it visits this site. A Two-Stage Stochastic Model with recourse is developed to represent the problem using a scenario-based approach. The fast-forward selection algorithm is implemented to reduce the set of scenarios.  Experiments are performed considering Poisson distributed profits.