A blood bank inventory control model for red blood cells. (1st January 2001) - Kozan, Erhan
Meeting the demand of hospitals and pathology laboratories for a complex mix of blood products is very critical in terms of health care and has to be done within resource constraints placed on blood banks. This paper aims to produce a mathematical model to determine the best policy for despatching red cells units to hospitals and laboratories. The model that has been developed finds the optimal despatching policy while minimising the number of outdated units and maintaining safety stocks as well as satisfying no-shortage policies. The problem has been formulated as an integer linear program and solved by using GAMS.