A queueing network approach for appointment scheduling of blood donors

This paper presents a MINLP model (Mixed integer non linear programming) to schedule appointments of plasma and platelets donors in a blood collection system. Apart from these scheduled donors, there are also some random walk-in whole blood donors. The goal is to determine the optimal appointment schedules of scheduled donors in order to minimize the total waiting time of all donors in a day. We approximate the waiting times of all patients arrived in an hourly period by the corresponding steady-state performances of the queueing network. The appointment scheduling is then modeled as a mixed integer non linear programming problem. The resulting appointment schedules are then compared with other schedules by simulation. Numerical experiments are then performed to assess the efficiency of the proposed appointment scheduling approach.