Demand Forecasting for Blood Components Distribution of a Blood Supply Chain

The blood center is the focus unit of a blood supply chain; and it has among its main assignments, the following activities: blood collection from donors, blood processing and blood components distribution to hospitals and healthcare institutions. It is surely the nervous center of the chain where planning, monitoring and controlling of these activities must be efficiently performed in order to prevent the stockout or outdate of blood components. All efficiency performance provided by a blood center will depend on the quality of its planning process, which starts with a good accuracy of forecasting required for blood supply and blood components. In this paper, a computational environment, which is oriented for forecasting of blood components, is presented. The idea is to improve the planning of the inventory balance process of the blood supply chain.