A simulation study of donor scheduling systems for the American Red Cross

doi:10.1016/0305-0548(93)90075-T

Computers & Operations Research

Volume 20, Issue 2, February 1993, Pages 199-213

https://doi.org/10.1016/0305-0548(93)90075-T Get rights and content

Abstract

We use computer simulation to evaluate several strategies for scheduling the arrival of blood donors to a Red Cross blood drive. After building and validating a model of the current blood donation process, we tested various strategies using the actual arrival profiles of the donors. The mean transit times of the donors were compared for the different strategies to determine which was most effective.

References (3)

M.L. Pratt et al.
Computer simulation analysis of blood donor queuing problems
Transfusion
(1982)

There are more references available in the full text version of this article.

Cited by (20)

An appointment scheduling framework to balance the production of blood units from donation
2018, European Journal of Operational Research
Citation Excerpt :
In the following, we focus on such level, which is closely related to the appointment scheduling system developed in this paper. Michaels, Brennan, Golden, and Fu (1993) developed a simulation study to evaluate scheduling strategies for donors who arrive at a Red Cross blood drive, and compared them in terms of mean transit time to find out the most effective one. Testik, Ozkaya, Aksu, and Ozcebe (2012) identified donor arrival patterns and employed a queuing network model of the donation process to dimension the workforce.
Blood is fundamental in several care treatments and surgeries, and plays a crucial role in the health care system. It is a limited resource, as it can be produced only by donors and its shelf life is short; thus, the blood donation (BD) system aims at providing adequate supply of blood units to transfusion centers and hospitals. An effective collection of blood units from donors is fundamental for adequately feeding the entire BD system and optimizing blood usage. However, despite its relevance, donation scheduling is only marginally addressed in the literature. In this paper we consider the Blood Donation Appointment Scheduling (BDAS) problem, aiming at balancing the production of the different blood types among days in order to provide a quite constant feeding of blood units to the BD system. We propose a framework for the appointment reservation that accounts for both booked donors and donors arriving without a reservation. It consists of an offline Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model for preallocating time slots to blood types, and an online prioritization policy to assign a preallocated slot when the donor calls to make the reservation.
Coordinating collection and appointment scheduling operations at the blood donation sites
2015, Computers and Industrial Engineering
Citation Excerpt :
In the computational study, we assume that there are 3 vehicles that operate from 9 am to 7 pm. Furthermore, we assume that each donation takes about an hour (Michaels, Brennan, Golden, & Fu, 1993) and service time (for pickup and delivery) of all the donation sites and the processing center is 0.2 h. In these instances, the average truck speed is set to 45 miles per hour (U.S. Department of Energy, 2014) to account for the average driving speed in Houston, TX.
According to the regulations imposed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the American Association of Blood Banks, in order to extract platelets, donated blood units have to be processed at a processing center within six hours of donation time. In this paper, considering this processing time requirement of donated blood units for platelet production we study collection and appointment scheduling operations at the blood donation sites. Specifically, given the blood donation network of a blood collection organization, we try to coordinate pickup and appointment schedules at the blood donation sites to maximize platelet production. We call the problem under consideration Integrated Collection and Appointment Scheduling Problem. We first provide a mixed integer linear programming model for the problem. Then, we propose a heuristic algorithm called Integer Programming Based Algorithm. We perform a computational study to test the performance of the proposed model and algorithm in terms of solution quality and computational efficiency on the instances from Gulf Coast Regional Blood Center located in Houston, TX.
Supply chain management of blood products: A literature review
2012, European Journal of Operational Research
Citation Excerpt :
Pegels et al. [32] discuss various blood service policy changes, which include the use of a scheduling algorithm to schedule visits to organizations. A simulation study of donor scheduling systems for the American Red Cross can be found in Michaels et al. [64]. Table 4 lists the papers according to inbound problems.
This paper presents a review of the literature on inventory and supply chain management of blood products. First, we identify different perspectives on approaches to classifying the existing material. Each perspective is presented as a table in which the classification is displayed. The classification choices are exemplified through the citation of key references or by expounding the features of the perspective. The main contribution of this review is to facilitate the tracing of published work in relevant fields of interest, as well as identifying trends and indicating which areas should be subject to future research.
A Benders decomposition approach for planning home blood donations
2024, Flexible Services and Manufacturing Journal
A three-stage matheuristic for home blood donation appointment reservation and collection routing
2023, Flexible Services and Manufacturing Journal
Blood supply chain: the impact of facility location and inventory allocation decisions for non-blood inventories - analytical case study
2022, International Journal of Services and Operations Management

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^†: Jennifer D. Michaels is a recent graduate of the University of Maryland where she received her M.S. in Information Systems. She received her B.S. in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Ms Michaels has experience with cost analysis of Naval weapons systems for the Department of the Navy.

^§: Bruce L. Golden is a Professor in the College of Business and Management at the University of Maryland. He has served as Chairman of the Department of Management Science and Statistics since 1980. His research interests include network optimization, transportation planning, fisheries management, and applied operations research, and he has published more than 125 technical articles in these and related fields. In addition, he has edited numerous volumes on vehicle routing, computing in operations research, and applied statistics.

^∥: Michael C. Fu is an Assistant Professor of Management Science and Statistics in the College of Business and Management at the University of Maryland. His research interests include stochastic derivative estimation and stochastic optimization, particularly with applications towards manufacturing systems and inventory control.

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A simulation study of donor scheduling systems for the American Red Cross

Abstract

Computer simulation analysis of blood donor queuing problems

Transfusion