A non-clustered approach to platelet collection routing problem

Abstract

One of the blood components that can be extracted from whole blood is the platelet, which has a wide range of uses in medical fields. Due to the perishable nature of platelets, it is recommended that the separation occurs within six hours after the donation. Moreover, platelets constitute less than one percent of the whole blood volume, yet they are highly demanded. Given the importance of platelets in healthcare, their perishability, and their limited supply, an effective platelet supply chain leans on well-managed whole blood collection operations. In this study, we consider a blood collection problem (BCP) focusing on the collection of whole blood donations from the blood donation sites (BDSs). Different from the basic form of BCP, we consider the processing time limit (PTL) of blood and arbitrary donation patterns of donors as well as relaxing the assumption of assigning each blood collection vehicle (BCV) to a set of BDSs. Therefore, we define the non-clustered maximum blood collection problem (NCMBCP) as a variant of BCP. In this study, we examine routing decisions for platelet collections while relaxing the clustering requirement from the BDSs, which results in a significant increase in the complexity of the problem. In order to solve the problem, we propose a hybrid genetic algorithm (HGA) and an invasive weed optimization (IWO) algorithm that provide considerable improvements over the best solution in the literature for the clustered variant of the problem and outperform it (on average) by 8.68% and 8.16%, respectively.