Running a cost-effective human blood transfusion supply chain challenges decision makers in blood services world-wide. In this paper, we develop a Markov decision process with the objective of minimising the overall costs of internal and external collections, storing, producing and disposing of blood bags, whilst explicitly considering the probability that a donated blog bag will perish before demanded. The model finds an optimal policy to collect additional bags based on the number of bags in stock rather than using information about the age of the oldest item. Using data from the literature, we validate our model and carry out a case study based on data from a large blood supplier in South America. The study helped achieve an overall increase of 4.5% in blood donations in one year.

运行具有成本效益的人类输血供应链对全球血液服务的决策者提出了挑战。在本文中，我们开发了一个马尔可夫决策过程，其目标是最小化内部和外部收集、存储、生产和处理血袋的总体成本，同时明确考虑捐赠的博客袋在被要求之前消亡的可能性。该模型根据库存袋子的数量而不是使用有关最旧物品的年龄的信息找到收集额外袋子的最佳策略。使用文献中的数据，我们验证了我们的模型，并根据来自南美洲一家大型血液供应商的数据进行了案例研究。该研究帮助实现了一年内献血总量增加 4.5%。