A two-stage multi-echelon stochastic blood supply chain problem

This paper presents a two-stage stochastic programming problem for red blood cells that simultaneously considers production, inventory and location decisions. In the first stage, the problem determines the number of mobile blood collection facilities to deploy, while the second stage determines inventory and production decisions. The problem aims to minimize three objective functions: the number of outdated units, system costs, and blood delivery time. Using the epsilon-constraint method, the tri-objective problem is converted to a single-objective mixed integer programming (MIP) problem which is solved using CPLEX for a real case study from The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Finally, managerial insights are drawn from computational experiments.