Biomedical sample transportation in the province of Quebec: a case study

Abstract

Biomedical sample management plays a central role in an efficient health care system and requires important resources. Based on our collaboration with the Quebec’s Ministère de la Santé et des Services sociaux (Ministry of Health and Social Services), this article describes the challenging context of biomedical sample transportation in the Canadian province of Quebec. It is modelled on a variant of the multi-trip vehicle routing problem with time windows where routes need to be planned from a laboratory to satisfy the multiple pick-up requests of each sample collection centre under some practical constraints. We propose and evaluate two alternative mathematical formulations, as well as fast heuristics, to minimise total transportation distances. The performance of the proposed methods is assessed over a large case study based on the network of laboratories in the province of Quebec.

Keywords:

• biomedical sample transportation
• vehicle routing
• multi-trips
• time windows

Acknowledgements

We express our gratitude to Dominic Morand, conseiller à la direction de la logistique et des équipements, of the MSSS for his collaboration on this project. The authors are also grateful to the anonymous referees for their useful and constructive comments and suggestions.

Notes

1. Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean, Capitale-Nationale, Mauricie and Montérégie.

Additional information

Funding

This research was partially supported by Canadian Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) [grant number OPG 0293307], [grant number OPG 0172633].