Robust Optimization Of Red Blood Cell Products Inventory Management Considering Lateral Transshipment And Substitution

Although great breakthroughs have been made in biological and medical technology in recent years,red blood cell product is still a scarce and irreplaceable medical resource.The research on inventory management of red blood cell products is of great significance.It plays a key role in making effective use of resources and reducing waste and shortage.However,the perishability of red blood cell products and the uncertainty of demand bring great challenges to the inventory management of red blood cell products.At the same time,the substitutability between red blood cell products of different blood groups further increases the difficulty of this problem.According to the characteristics of perishability and substitutability of red blood cell products,this paper will study the inventory management of blood products under uncertain demand based on robust optimization method.This paper considers an inventory system of red blood cell products,which includes a blood center and several hospitals.System decision makers need to consider the perishability and substitutability of red blood cell products,and decide the ordering decision of each hospital and the transshipment decision between hospitals in the limited planning horizon,so as to achieve the optimal total cost of the system.Due to the uncertainty of the demand for red blood cell products in the hospital,this paper establishes a two-stage robust model to deal with this uncertainty.In the first stage,the target inventory level and transshipment decision are made according to the forecasted demand information.In the second stage,the blood transfusion decision including substitution is made according to the realized demand,and the number of wastage and shortage of red blood cell products are calculated.Through the structural characteristics of the robust optimization model,the model is transformed into an equivalent large-scale linear programming model that is easy to solve.In the numerical experiment,the two-stage robust model is compared with the corresponding deterministic model and two-stage stochastic model.The experimental results show that the two-stage robust model has certain advantages in reducing the total cost and shortage level compared with the other two models.In the sensitivity analysis,the results under different unit emergency order cost and unit substitution cost further show the superiority of the two-stage robust model.The research conclusions in this paper can provide theoretical reference for relevant managers on the inventory management of red blood cell products.