A Transportation Location-Allocation Model for Regional Blood Banking

Abstract

In recent years, there has been much discussion about the issue of regionalization of blood banking systems. In this work we focus on the transportation location-allocation aspects of regionalization. We are given the locations and expected blood requirements of a set of N hospitals. Each hospital is to be assigned to a regional blood bank which will periodically supply the hospital's expected blood requirement for the period, as well as supply its emergency blood demands at the time of the emergency. The blood shipments are to be made by special delivery vehicles which have given capacities and given limits on the number of deliveries they can make per day. We present algorithms to decide how many blood banks to set up, where to locate them, how to allocate the hospitals to the banks, and how to route the periodic supply operation, so that the total of transportation costs (periodic and emergency supply costs) and the system costs are minimum. The algorithms are tested on data from the Chicago area where very good results are obtained.

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