Supply chain design for efficient and effective blood supply in disasters

The emergency supply of blood in natural and anthropogenic disasters has proved challenging. This article presents a stochastic bi-objective supply chain design model for the efficient (cost minimizing) and effective (delivery time minimizing) supply of blood in disasters. The blood supply network under investigation is comprised of blood donors, mobile blood facilities, local and regional blood centers and demand points. A hybrid solution approach, combining the ε-constraint and Lagrangian relaxation methods, is developed to solve the proposed model. Our numerical experiments and subsequent discussions focus on (1) investigating the utility of the proposed model in solving different size problems, (2) exploring possible tradeoffs between supply chain cost and delivery time, (3) identifying the areas along the supply chain where investments can be made to improve supply chain efficiency and effectiveness and (4) performance benchmarking of the proposed stochastic programming approach.