Blood donation towards service delocalization: new models and new challenges

The Blood Donation Supply Chain (BDSC) provides blood units to the different health services in Western countries, whose first step is the collection of blood from healthy donors. It requires a careful planning because unbalanced supply of blood units to the rest of the chain could give periods of blood shortage and wastage. Morever, as common to other health care service, a deep restructuring of blood collection could meet delocalization needs, innovative ways of recruiting new donors, and any future pandemic or emergency. To this end, new organizational models for blood collection are needed, in which blood is collected at donor's homes. However, they require ad-hoc a decision support tools for their management. We proposed a decision support tool that consists of an integrated matheuristic framework with three decision stages: a planning model to create the donation slots that will be assigned to donors, an online allocation of these slots using a flexible set of criteria, and a Multi-Trip Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (MTVRP-TW) to route the bloodmobiles that collect blood at donors' homes. The goals are to balance the production of blood units between days, to minimize the distance traveled by the bloodmobiles, and to immediately provide a list of slots to choose from when a donor makes a booking request. The proposed framework has been tested on data from a large Italian provider, i.e., the Milan branch of the "Associazione Volontari Italiani del Sangue" (AVIS).