An updated review on blood supply chain quantitative models: A disaster perspective

Abstract

After the occurrence of a disaster, relief operations are needed to help survivors and injured people. Among the relief commodities required for affected areas, blood products are critically important because a shortage can threaten the lives of injured people. Accordingly, the blood supply chain (BSC) in disaster situations has been a growing area of research focus in recent years. Indeed, there has been an increase in the number of papers published on BSCs since 2018, and most of these papers relate to disaster situations. Meanwhile, the most recent review paper on BSCs explicitly excluded disaster situations. Consequently, in the current paper we present a state-of-the-art review of quantitative models for BSCs whose main theme is disaster situations. Our review design is based on a taxonomy from a 2015 review paper. A detailed analysis on solution methods is also presented. In addition, we highlight both the academic research gap as well as the requirements of health system and relief organizations to provide practical directions for future research. Naturally, although we designed a comprehensive procedure for exploring papers, it is possible that some papers have been missed due to our search strategy and this should be considered as a limitation of the current research.