Multi‐objective optimization of transporting blood products by routing UAVs: the case of Istanbul

Abstract

Since the blood is necessary for surgical operations, disease treatments, chronic disorders, and traumatic accidents, it is staminal to manage the flow in the supply chain of blood products from donors to patients that can save lives. Therefore, this paper focuses on transporting blood products from distribution centers to hospitals in cities by routing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The problem includes two objective functions as minimizing the used number of UAVs and their total travel distances, simultaneously by considering range, payload weight, and payload volume of UAVs. The problem also covers the blood product demands of hospitals and the supply capacities of distribution centers. A multi-objective integer programming (MOIP) model and three multi-objective metaheuristics are designed to solve the defined problem. To test the effectiveness of the proposed methods, real-life blood product demands of hospitals in Istanbul for the year 2019 are obtained from the Turkish Red Crescent and several scenarios are created as the case study. In scenarios, two types of vertical take-off and landing UAVs are considered, the MOIP is developed by using ILOG, solved via CPLEX, and the metaheuristics are coded in MATLAB. The results reveal that the proposed methods can find good solutions for the problem in acceptable CPU times.

Two‐stage distributionally robust optimization model for a pharmaceutical cold supply chain network design problem

“…Dalalah and Alkhaledi (2023) studied the problem of blood inventory with stochastic demand. The above summary shows that although many articles in recent years have begun to focus on PSCND problems, including some articles studying SCND for vaccines (De Boeck et al., 2020; Petroianu et al., 2021; Lim et al., 2022), blood products (Mara et al., 2021; Ozkan, 2023), or essential medicines (Kumar and Das, 2023), there have been few studies on the problem of cold SCND for a variety of drugs that require low‐temperature storage. Therefore, this paper considers the design of cold chain networks for a variety of pharmaceutical products that require low‐temperature storage and transportation.…”

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) in the structures of the prison service in Poland

“…BSP postrzegane są jako narzędzia służące ochronie życia i zdrowia ludzi (Alsamhi i in., 2021;Euchi, 2021) , w tym np. transportu krwi (Yakushiji i in., 2020;Ozkan, 2023) i urządzeń medycznych Aggarwal i in., 2021), poszukiwania osób zaginionych (Javed i in., 2022: Martinez-Alpiste i in. 2021), ratownictwa wodnego (Feraru i in., 2020;Afridi i in., 2019) czy rozpoznania miejsc katastrofy (Ostrihansky, Szmigiero, 2020, s. 27;Vanderhorst, 2022;Aiello i in., 2020).…”

Possibilities of Using UAVs in Pre-Hospital Security for Medical Emergencies

“…A study from Istanbul on optimizing the transportation of blood products from distribution centers to hospitals in cities using UAV routes proposed an optimal path and type of UAV while minimizing the number of UAVs used, optimizing the route, range, weight, and volume of UAV payload. Test results show that the proposed methods can find good solutions to the problem in acceptable CPU times [ 63 ]. However, the emergency poses greater risks in medical transportation.…”