Hybrid ordering policies for platelet inventory management under demand uncertainty

Abstract

Hospitals are imposed with the challenge of developing efficient blood inventory management tools due to its limited supply and uncertain demand. Besides, the short shelf-life of blood further complicates the task of its inventory administration. Since lifesaving blood is required as frequent as once in two seconds and blood donations are falling short of patient needs, hospitals maintain a high inventory level that leads to excess blood (especially platelet) wastage. In this study, we propose two new variants of review policies for platelet inventory management at hospitals, namely, $(s,S,\alpha ,Q)$ and $(s,S,\beta ,Q),$ which aim to achieve a trade-off solution between shortage and wastage. The proposed hybrid policies are compared against two well-performing ordering policies in the literature, for real-life hospital settings by considering unique characteristics such as weekday/weekend demand fluctuation and varying shelf-life of platelet units received. Experimental results and statistical analysis show a significant improvement in the performance measures using the proposed policies. The models can serve as a decision support system by assisting healthcare practitioners in determining the best order quantities, given the hospital characteristics.

Keywords:

• OR in health services
• platelet inventory management
• uncertain demand
• hybrid inventory policies
• decision support system
• stochastic programing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.