Developing a Stochastic Programming Model for the Design an‎d Planning of a Resilient Blood Supply Chain Network under Disruption

5/9/2027 12:00:00 AM

The blood supply chain, due to the vital, perishable, an‎d irreplaceable nature of this product, is considered one of the most sensitive healthcare infrastructures. This sensitivity is further intensified during crisis conditions, where deman‎d increases abruptly while logistical capacities are simultaneously disrupted. Despite previous studies in this field, the simultaneous integration of multiple resilience strategies within a unified stochastic programming framework has received limited attention. This study presents a bi-objective, multi-period mixed-integer linear programming model for the design of a resilient blood supply chain network under uncertainty. The proposed network encompasses four tiers: temporary blood collection centers, blood banks, hospitals, an‎d crisis-affected regions. The first objective function minimizes blood shortages at deman‎d points, while the second objective minimizes the total investment an‎d operational costs of the network. The main contribution of this research lies in the simultaneous integration of five resilience strategies pre-disaster fortification, post-disaster capacity expansion, direct shipment from blood banks to crisis regions, multimodal transportation, an‎d multiple allocation within a two-stage stochastic programming framework. The model is implemented using real data from Saveh County in the GAMS software an‎d solved using the epsilon-constraint method. The results indicate that multiple allocation, facility fortification, an‎d post-disaster capacity expansion have the greatest impact on reducing shortages, whereas direct shipment an‎d multimodal transportation play a key role in reducing network costs. Furthermore, the significant superiority of the two-stage stochastic programming approach over the expected value approach is confirmed using the value of the stochastic solution (VSS) metric.

زنجيره تأمين خون , مديريت بحران , برنامه‌ريزي تصادفي دومرحله‌اي , استراتژي تاب‌آوري , بهينه‌سازي چندهدفه

Blood supply chain , crisis management , two-stage stochastic programming , resilience strategies , multi-objective optimization

Arian Dadkhah

Dr. Seyyed-Mahdi Hosseini-Motlagh . Dr. Mohammad Mahdi Vali-Siar