Designing a Multi-Level Blood Supply Chain Network with the Likelihood of Shortage and Perishability in the Inventory

Blood is a vital substance for human life. A blood unit goes through various stages from its donation by the donor until its reception by the person in need of blood. This process can be explored the context of supply chain management. For this purpose, a mathematical model is developed in this study to design a blood supply chain network. The noticeable feature of this network is the inclusion of the shortage and perishability of blood products as two important indicators. The mathematical model proposed in this regard has the two objective functions of minimizing the blood supply chain costs and, at the same time, maximizing the average amount of blood sent from blood centers to hospitals. The model examines the problem in the case of a single product. The modified weighted Chebyshev, the improved version of ε-constraint (AUGEMCON2), and unscaled goal programming are used to solve the mathematical model. Then, to evaluate and compare the proposed solution methods and select the best one, the statistical hypothesis test and the VIKOR technique are used respectively. Also, to investigate the reaction of the objective functions to the changes in the model parameters, several sensitivity analyses are performed. The results show that the model proposed for the blood supply chain is efficient and acceptable; hence, it can be of benefit in different types of blood supply chains where the shortage and perishability of blood products are taken into account.