Tactical planning of bloodmobile collection systems

This paper addresses the problem of tactical planning of mobile whole blood collection in a region in order to guarantee the regional self-sufficiency over a yearly planning horizon. Two MILP models (Mixed integer linear programming) are proposed is to determine when a mobile collection must be organized at a location by taking into account human resource capacity, stock level and regulation constraints. The first model evaluates a collection plan where the number of mobile collections at each location is given. The second model has additional decision of the number of collections at each location and evaluates the amount of blood collected by taking into account demographics, donor generosity and donor availability. Numerical experiments are then performed to assess the efficiency of the proposed models with field data from the French Blood Service (EFS, Etablissement Français du Sang) in the Auvergne-Loire Region.