Presenting a Robust Optimization Model to Design a Comprehensive Blood Supply Chain under Supply and Demand Uncertainties

Neglecting the supply chain management of perishable goods could create a lot of costs for organizations and companies. Blood is a perishable product in the healthcare supply chain, the  shortage of which could prove quite problematic and disastrous. Any improvements in the blood supply chain management operations may increase service efficiency and decrease the cost of the healthcare system, saving the lives of lots of people. In this paper, a mixed-integer nonlinear programming model is proposed for comprehensive blood supply chain management, which includes gathering, processing and distributing blood and blood products by taking into account the demand lifetime and age. This model aims at decreasing supply chain costs and blood product deficiency. Robust optimization is utilized to take into account the inherent uncertainty and volatility of the demand and supply. The proposed model is first tested on a small-scale numerical example in GAMS software. Then a large-scale problem is solved using Whale and Imperialist Competition algorithms and the results are compared. In addition, a case study is presented to show the applicability of the proposed model.