Coordinating collection and appointment scheduling operations at the blood donation sites

• Coordinating pickup and appointment schedules improves the platelet supply.
• Mathematical formulation can find solutions with an average optimality gap of around 6%.
• A priori clustering improves both the solution quality and the runtime.

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.