Location of low-cost blood collection and distribution centres in Thailand

Abstract

Decision making on facility locations for blood services has an impact on the efficiency of supply chain and logistics systems. In the blood supply chain operated by the Thai Red Cross Society (TRCS), problems are faced with amounts of blood collected in different provinces of Thailand being insufficient to meet demand. At the present time, TRCS operates one National Blood Centre in the capital and twelve Regional Blood Centres in different provinces to collect, prepare, test, and distribute safe blood. A proposal has been made to extend this network of blood centres using low-cost collection and distribution centres. Increasing numbers of fixed collection sites can improve access for donors. In addition, some facilities will be able to perform preparation and storage for blood that hospitals can receive directly. This paper addresses the selection of sites for two types of facility, either a blood donation room only or donation room with a distribution centre. A range of investment budgets is investigated to inform the strategic plan of this non-profit organisation. We present a novel binary integer programming model for this location-allocation problem based on objectives of improving the supply of blood products while reducing costs of transportation. Computational results are reported, using real life data, that are of practical importance to decision makers.

Designing the blood supply chain: how much, how and where?

“…Economy of scale is a key driver of centralization. Building and maintaining blood supply chain infrastructure are expensive; hence, location decisions are typically regarded as strategic; many authors have studied location and allocation decisions in blood supply chains .…”

Organ transplantation logistics: a case for Turkey

“…Blood banking is one of the most common issues studied in healthcare logistics. The supply chain design of the blood-banking network is addressed by location-allocation models by many authors (Nagurney and Masoumi (2012), Zahiri and Pishvaee (2017), Chaiwuttisak et al (2016)). Sahin et al (2007) developed a location-allocation model for blood services of the Turkish Red Crescent Society by decomposing the problem into subproblems and tackling the issue of locating service facilities and assigning demand points in three stages.…”

ELECTRE I Based Relevance Decision-Makers Feedback to the Location Selection of Distribution Centers

“…Nature of the Problem. Much of the literature has studied the problem of selecting DCs' location under a certain and a deterministic environment [9,11,12,[15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32]. This kind of problem was characterized as static and deterministic, and parameters are known and fixed [33].…”

“…In this category of methods, there is more work compared to the other two categories (cited above). Among these approaches, we cite the conceptual framework based on Adjusted Kuehn-Hamburger model, the method based on Grid model and ELECTRE [13], the Fixed-Charge Facility Location model [14], the Genetic algorithm [15][16][17], the Bilevel Programming model [18], the method based on Center of Gravity principle [19], the Binary Integer Programming [20], the Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm [21][22][23], the DNA Artificial Fish Swarm algorithm [24], the Firefly algorithm [25], the method based on the Genetic algorithm, and AHP [26].…”