Optimal Control of a Network of Whole Blood Banks: A Transportation Location-Allocation Model for Regional Blood Banking

摘要

This work focused on the transportation location-allocation aspects of regionalization. The authors are given the locations and expected blood requirements of a set of N hospitals. Each hospital was assigned to a regional blood bank which would periodically (the period, which is determined as a function of hospital size and the distribution of patient arrivals, could be daily, biweekly, weekly) supply the hospital's expected blood requirement for the period, as well as supply its emergency blood demands. Algorithms were used 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 were tested on data from the Chicago area where very good results were obtained.