A Multistage Algorithm for Blood Banking Supply Chain Allocation Problem

Abstract

This paper proposes an efficient method for allocating a number of blood centers to a set of hospitals to minimize the total distance between the hospitals and the blood centers, based on the concept of graph partitioning (p-median methodology) and metaheuristic optimization algorithms. For this purpose, a weighted graph is first constructed for the network denoted by G 0. A coarsening process is then performed to match the edges in n stages. Then, the enhanced colliding bodies (ECBO) algorithm is applied to the coarsened model to decompose it into p subdomains by using a p-median methodology. In the present problem, p is the number of blood centers to be allocated for the hospitals. The results indicate that the proposed algorithm performs quite satisfactory from both computational time and optimality points of view.