A Benders decomposition approach for planning home blood donations

The availability of a sufficient blood supply is crucial for ensuring high- quality and fully-functional health services. Unfortunately, blood and its components are highly perishable: this forbids long term conservation and requires continuous donations by unpaid volunteers. We consider the problem of planning blood donation services, where the donors are reached at home. The scope is to minimize the penalty for the unserved donors, while guaranteeing that a budget constraint is respected and that the preferences of the donors for the appointments are met. The donors availability is subject to uncertainty, which is modeled using a set of scenarios. A Benders decomposition approach to solve the problem is developed. The pro- posed algorithm is tested on real-life instances coming from the Milan department of the Associazione Volontari Italiani Sangue (AVIS).