Developing multi-choice goal programming for reducing wastages and shortages of blood products at hospitals with considering cross matching ratio

Abstract

Challenges in shortages and wastages of blood products in hospitals are the most important issues in the blood supply chain. Due to the perishability of blood products, hospitals have difficulties to determine an adequate number of blood units which led to wastages as a result of excessive orders or shortage as result of an inadequate number of blood units. Both situations lead to irreparable results since blood is a limited invaluable source that has to do with health-related activities. In this paper, we develop Multi-Choice Goal Programming (MCGP) for an integer programming model to minimize total transportation, wastage, inventory, and shortage costs, and the difference of hospitals demand from Blood Transfusion Center (BTC) and ordered amount of BTC of m hospitals. We focus on Red Blood Cells (RBCs) of the whole blood components. Next, a case study of real-life data of eleven hospitals in Zanjan province of Iran (ZPI), has been evaluated with the model in three demand scenarios for considering uncertainty.