Exact and Heuristic Solutions to Minimize Total Waiting Time in the Blood Products Distribution Problem.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Advances in Operations Research Volume 2012, Article ID 393890, 25 pages doi:10.1155/2012/393890 Research Article Exact and Heuristic Solutions to Minimize Total Waiting Time in the Blood Products Distribution Problem Amir Salehipour1 and Mohammad Mehdi Sepehri1, 2 1 Department of Industrial Engineering, School of Engineering, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran 14117-13114, Iran 2 Hospital Management Research Center, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran 19697-14713, Iran Correspondence should be addressed to Mohammad Mehdi Sepehri, mehdi.sepehri@ Received 18 October 2011; Revised 29 March 2012; Accepted 14 May 2012 Academic Editor: Silvano Martello Copyright q 2012 A. Salehipour and M. M. Sepehri. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. This paper presents a novel application of operations research to support decision making in blood distribution management. The rapid and dynamic increasing demand, criticality of the product, storage, handling, and distribution requirements, and the different geographical locations of hospitals and medical centers have made blood distribution a complex and important problem. In this study, a real blood distribution problem containing 24 hospitals was tackled by the authors, and an exact approach was presented. The objective of the problem is to distribute blood and its products among hospitals and medical centers such that the total waiting time of those requiring the product is minimized. Following the exact solution, a hybrid heuristic algorithm is proposed. Computational experime