An appointment scheduling framework to balance the production of blood units from donation

Seda Baş, Giuliana Carello, Ettore Lanzarone and Semih Yalçındağ

European Journal of Operational Research, 2018, vol. 265, issue 3, 1124-1143

Abstract: Blood is fundamental in several care treatments and surgeries, and plays a crucial role in the health care system. It is a limited resource, as it can be produced only by donors and its shelf life is short; thus, the blood donation (BD) system aims at providing adequate supply of blood units to transfusion centers and hospitals. An effective collection of blood units from donors is fundamental for adequately feeding the entire BD system and optimizing blood usage. However, despite its relevance, donation scheduling is only marginally addressed in the literature. In this paper we consider the Blood Donation Appointment Scheduling (BDAS) problem, aiming at balancing the production of the different blood types among days in order to provide a quite constant feeding of blood units to the BD system. We propose a framework for the appointment reservation that accounts for both booked donors and donors arriving without a reservation. It consists of an offline Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model for preallocating time slots to blood types, and an online prioritization policy to assign a preallocated slot when the donor calls to make the reservation.

Keywords: OR in health systems; Blood Donation Appointment Scheduling; Production balancing; Mixed Integer Linear Programming model; Offline and online procedure (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:265:y:2018:i:3:p:1124-1143

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2017.08.054

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