Innovative approaches to optimal blood supply chain management problems

Sara de Jesus Franco

Key information

Authors:

Sara de Jesus Franco (Sara de Jesus Franco)

Supervisors:

Daniel Rebelo dos Santos (Daniel Rebelo dos Santos); Ana Paula Ferreira Dias Barbosa Póvoa (Ana Paula Ferreira Dias Barbosa Póvoa)

Published in

November 24, 2022

Abstract

Blood is vital to life, playing a necessary role in various basic human needs. However, it is perishable, unique and both its supply and demand are uncertain as its availability depends on voluntary and unpaid donations and future events are unpredictable. The essential nature of blood, perishability, uniqueness and uncertainty increase the complexity of managing its supply chain. In fact, the Portuguese case presents inefficiencies, particularly high wastage levels for platelets. Thus, it is of great importance to have an efficient and sustainable method, able to fix existing inefficiencies. Hence, a literature review was carried on the blood supply chain and other perishable supply chains, namely the agro-food supply chain, to find possible knowledge transfers from the agro-food to the blood supply chain. Therefrom, an innovative model was developed, mainly focused on minimizing waste and increasing the quality of transfusions, which introduces a maximum age, specific for each demand node, corresponding to the maximum age for transfusions and beyond which demand nodes return blood to the blood center, to be redistributed to other demand nodes. The model was applied to the Portuguese case, for pools of platelets with pathogenic reduction, and the results showed that, although in relatively modest quantities, redistributing blood is beneficial for reducing its waste. Additionally, the average age of transfusions and the level of substitutions presented better results. Additional analysis proved that further wastage reduction could be achieved when considering products with higher shelf lifes.