Blood supply chain network design under uncertainties in supply and demand considering social aspects

Blood supply chain design is an issue which has been investigated in the literature to some extent. Blood donation is a voluntary activity and blood donors are important in the blood supply chain. It is suitable to attempt to increase blood donors' utility in order to reduce shortages and harmful damages. Parameters including distance of blood donors from blood facilities, experience factor of donors in blood facilities and advertising budget in blood facilities are considered social aspects and applied to form utility function used in this paper. The aim was to increase utility and motivate blood donors to donate blood. First, a deterministic location-allocation model is proposed applying a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) optimization. Due to the stochastic nature of demand and cost parameters, the aforementioned model is developed to incorporate uncertainty using a robust optimization approach that can overcome the limitations of scenario-based solution methods, i.e., without excessive changes in complexity of the underlying base deterministic model. The application of the proposed model is evaluated by a case study in Tehran. Numerical results obtained and sensitivity analysis helps administrators in the decision making process for investment projects.