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

Blood is fundamental in several care treatments and surgeries, and plays a crucial role in the healthcare system. It is a limited resource as it can be produced only by donors and its shelf life is short. Blood Donation (BD) system aims at providing an adequate supply of blood bags to transfusion centers and hospitals. Its main phases are blood collection, screening, storage, distribution and utilization. An effective collection of blood bags from donors, through a suitable scheduling of donations, is fundamental for adequately feeding the entire BD system and optimizing blood usage. Despite its relevance, donor scheduling is only marginally addressed in the literature, whereas a high number of papers deal with blood storage and distribution. In this work, the Blood Donation Appointment Scheduling problem is considered, 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. A framework for the appointment reservation that accounts for both booked and nonbooked donors is proposed. 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.