Integrated blood collection and appointment scheduling

Abstract

Considering the processing requirements of donated blood, we study an integrated blood collection and appointment scheduling problem. We develop a mixed integer programming model to maximize the amount of donated blood that can be delivered to the processing center before spoilage as well as determine the schedule of donation appointments. Since the problem complexity and the computational time of MIP formulation is exponentially increasing by including more donation sites, we propose an insertion/saving heuristic algorithm to find a good feasible solution and develop a large neighborhood search method to improve the solution further.