Selective vehicle routing for a mobile blood donation system

•We define a new variant of VRP named as Selective VRP with Integrated Tours.•We propose exact and heuristic algorithms for this newly defined variant of VRP.•We use the model to design a new mobile blood collection system for Turkey.•We test the performance of the solution methods developed with real-life data.

In this study, a mobile blood collection system is designed with the primary objective of increasing blood collection levels. This design also takes into account operational costs to aim for collection of large amounts of blood at reasonable cost. Bloodmobiles perform direct tours to certain activities to collect blood, but at the end of each day, they bring the collected blood to a designated depot to prevent its spoilage. The proposed system consists of the bloodmobiles and a new vehicle called the shuttle that visits the bloodmobiles in the field on each day and transfers the collected blood to the depot. Consequently, bloodmobiles can continue their tours without having to make daily returns to the depot.We propose a mathematical model and a 2-stage IP based heuristic algorithm to determine the tours of the bloodmobiles and the shuttle, and their lengths of stay at each stop. This new problem is defined as an extension of the Selective Vehicle Routing Problem and is referred to as the SVRP with Integrated Tours. The performances of the solution methodologies are tested first on a real data set obtained from past blood donation activities of Turkish Red Crescent in Ankara, and then on a constructed data set based on GIS data of the European part of Istanbul. The Pareto set of optimum solutions is generated based on blood amounts and logistics costs, and finally a sensitivity analysis on some important design parameters is conducted.