Designing and optimizing a sustainable supply chain network for a blood platelet bank under uncertainty

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.engappai.2018.03.004Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Presenting a new possibilistic multi-objective model for a blood supply chain.

  • Considering all three aspects of sustainability in the presented model.

  • Determining locations, assignments, inventory, and vehicles’ routes simultaneously.

  • Applying the Me-based possibilistic approach to deal with uncertainty.

  • Developing a simulated annealing algorithm to solve large-sized problems.

Abstract

This paper develops a possibilistic optimization model for a multi-period and multi-objective sustainable blood supply chain with uncertain data due to an uncertain condition during a disaster and after it. The components considered in this study are donor groups, blood collection facilities, distribution centers, and hospitals as the demand points. The minimization of the total cost, environmental effects, in addition to the maximization of social effects are considered as the objectives to increase the efficiency of the network. Then ϵ-constraint method is utilized to transfer the multi-objective mathematical model to a mono objective one. In order to validate the proposed model, some test problems are investigated. For large-sized problems, a meta-heuristic algorithm, namely simulated annealing (SA) is provided for solving the model. Some numerical examples are solved and evaluated and the performance of the SA algorithm is compared with harmony search (HS) algorithm. Finally, the obtained results are discussed, and the conclusions are provided.

Introduction

Supply chain network design or SCND has a prominent effect on the performance of the supply chain. It deals with many aspects of the network, affecting its qualitative and quantitative performances such as numbers and locations of facilities, capacities of them as well as information and material flow allocations. Network configuration cannot be changed in short terms because of the significant expenses and the required time. The SCND is an important issue in tactical and operational decisions in the supply chain management Devika et al. (2014), Fu and Fu (2015), Amin et al. (2017).

The growing concerns to meet environmental, social, and legislative requirements are forcing companies to consider the impacts of sustainable supply chain (SSC) design on the environment and society (Govindan et al., 2014). An important concept in sustainability is Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). CSR is the effect of corporate activities on diverse groups which includes environmental conservation, workplace safety, human rights, right conditions for workers, etc. (Carter and Jennings, 2002).

Human blood is a vital and rare resource. It is extracted from the human body and currently, there is no other product or superseded chemical process that can be replaced with human blood. In addition, from all donated blood units, only a small amount is usable, and there is a required time interval between a person’s blood donation and the next turn. Thus, in the required time, the body can rebuild the lost blood.

Among the various blood products, platelets have a high degree of perishability because they can be saved just five days before deteriorating. For this reason, platelets are valuable resources. They are needed only in particular cases, but when they are required, we face circumstances in which numerous units should be transfused at one time. As a result, the demands of platelets are highly changeable (Abdulwahab and Wahab, 2014).

In several cases, supply chains include uncertain factors which have big impacts on the chains. As a result, it is essential to consider uncertainty in the design and optimization of the supply chains (Bashiri et al., 2012). In a supply chain, a disaster, one of the uncertainty sources, occurs when one or more activities of the members of the chain are interrupted that lead to the major disruptions in the normal flows of the services and the products (Glenn Richey Jr et al., 2009).

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 provides a brief literature review on the prior research pertinent to sustainable supply chain network and blood supply chain network design problems. Section 3 of this paper includes the definition of the problem and the mathematical formulation. In Section 4, the suggested solution methodology is given. In Section 5, implementation and evaluation of the proposed model are discussed. Finally, the conclusions and future research of the presented model are provided in Section 6.

Section snippets

Literature review

Javid and Azad (2010) stated that the design of a distribution network includes location–allocation, vehicle routing, and inventory problems. Some papers in the literature have integrated two of these problems. Some examples include location-routing problems (LRP) (Govindan et al., 2014), location-inventory problems (LIP) Daskin et al. (2002), Shen et al. (2003), inventory-routing problems (IRP) (Federgruen and Zipkin, 1984). In addition, many studies have investigated healthcare facility

Problem definition and the mathematical model

The blood supply chain network and the flows among the elements of the network are demonstrated in Fig. 1. The first part is related to the donation activities. Blood units are collected from various donor groups, either at a fixed blood facility or via temporary blood facilities. The operationalized fixed blood facilities and blood centers are selected among available potential locations. After the registration process, all donors who come to blood facilities are checked through a screening

Solution methodology

In this section, the details of the proposed solution are provided. The flowchart of the solution process is demonstrated in Fig. 2.

Implementation and evaluation

We have developed an SA algorithm for the mathematical model. We compare the efficiency of the developed SA algorithm with the results of CPLEX for validation. We have generated three test problems randomly in different sizes according to a uniform distribution. The numbers are written in Table 1. Furthermore, the sizes of the generated problems are summarized in Table 2. We use MATLAB R2013 to solve large-sized problems by the proposed SA algorithm, and CPLEX 10.0 solver in GAMS on a computer

Conclusions

Designing a blood supply chain network has an outstanding role in location and assignment of blood facilities as well as the allocation of the related supply chain flows. Because of the nature of the blood products, perishability is an important issue in this field. In this study, we have provided a mixed-integer linear programming formulation to design and optimize the SCND related to the blood products with three objective functions. Due to the existence of some inexact input parameters in

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank editor and reviewers for their constructive comments and helpful suggestions.

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