Scheduling the distribution of blood products: A vendor-managed inventory routing approach

Blood shortage may lead to immeasurable losses. But the perishable nature of blood products limits the possibility of storing a large amount of it, and the quality of blood products reduces rapidly with transportation time. Specifically, in China, the management of blood products is even more complicated due to the significant demand for clinical blood, which increases every single year because of the reformation of the health system and the resulting scale expansion of hospitals. In this research, we aim to optimize the blood product scheduling scheme by constructing a vendor-managed inventory routing problem (VMIRP) for blood products, which balances the supply and demand such that the relevant operational cost is minimized. Then a decomposition-based algorithm is developed to solve the proposed mathematical model efficiently. Based on a series of numerical experiments of platelets, we obtain and examine the distribution plan and optimal transportation path over the planning horizon. In addition to the illustrated high algorithm efficiency, the computation results show that the VMIRP scheme can considerably decrease the operational cost of the blood supply chain.