Modeling and Solving a Blood Supply Chain Network: An approach for Collection of Blood

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.