Modeling a production-inventory-routing problem of blood products using heuristic solution methods

Blood and blood products are vital resources for the surgery and the treatment of certain diseases. As a scarce and perishable resource, they require sophisticated management to minimize waste in order to address this challenge, the present study revolves around the idea of the management of the production, supply and distribution of blood products. In this research, two questions of robust and flexible have been investigated for the production, inventory and routing blood products. The flexibility is incorporated into the problem through introducing the possibility of sharing inventory among network entities by transferring blood products between hospitals and also the possibility of meeting a blood group's need with another compatible blood type or replacement. The problem is then solved by heuristic (local search) and meta-heuristic (Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search (ALNS)) algorithms, which are the methods of choice in particular for NP-hard problems. Finally, the results obtained from the two algorithms are compared it is shown that the heuristic algorithm outperforms the Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search (ALNS) in both models, that can lead to reduction is cost and required transitions.