Multi-echelon facility location models for the reorganization of the Blood Supply Chain at regional scale

Blood and blood products are crucial resources requiring effective management strategies and policies due to the potential severe consequences that could arise from their lack. Over the past two decades, the global healthcare community has recognized the significance of managing the Blood Supply Chain (BSC) efficiently and effectively. This includes policy-making, system design and organization. In this context, the Italian Healthcare Ministry issued a decree aimed at improving the BSC efficiency at regional level while reducing costs by providing several indications and restrictions to be accounted for. To address the need for improved BSC system management and design, we propose a mathematical modeling framework that builds upon and extends multi-echelon facility location and scenario-based mathematical models coming from literature, integrating soft constraints to achieve system aims with a multi-objective viewpoint. The proposed modeling framework has been implemented in two different perspectives: case-based and scenario-based. These two perspectives approaches are conceived to provide a comprehensive solution to the issue at hand, performing sensitivity analysis, and enabling the design of an efficient and effective BSC at the regional level, capable of handling inherent system uncertainty. To this aim, the proposed modeling framework comprises several objectives, including minimizing transportation costs, rationalizing the number and type of facilities, ensuring self-sufficiency, guaranteeing an average accessibility threshold, satisfying imposed restrictions and system constraints, and designing a system robust to varying exogenous and endogenous conditions. Real-world data sets were utilized to test and validate the proposed formulations. The obtained results demonstrate that they can be a valuable decision support tool for decision-makers, providing managerial insights and enabling the simulation of different system configurations.