Designing a closed-loop blood supply chain network considering transportation flow and quality aspects

Abstract

Managing blood and its sub-products is one of the challenging problems in healthcare management, where the managers attempt to solve them by designing appropriate supply chain networks. Although previous authors tried to enhance the performance of the blood supply chain, some critical concepts such as reusable blood trans- portation boxes were rarely considered. These boxes are the crucial apparatus in the transmission of products along the supply chain. As such, it is vital to discuss the related flow and quality features in the network using a mathematical formulation. Moreover, a closed-loop network design to achieve more economical and environ- mental benefits than a traditional design is a more efficient approach. Regarding these concerns, a closed-loop supply chain of blood products that considers blood transportation equipment and the relevant quality features is formulated in this paper first. Then, a differential evolution algorithm (DE), boosted by extending two new versions of DE, is used for solving the problem. Finally, some sensitivity analyses on the parameters of the model are performed to report some managerial insights.