Designing a supply chain network for blood decomposition by utilizing social and environmental factor

abstract

© 2021 Elsevier LtdRecently, supply chain network design has been a demanding question and attracted great interest in a wide range of fields, including the medical industry. The heart of the entire discipline of the medical industry is the concept of blood management which nowadays brought striking attention among managers and decision-makers. Thus, a bi-objective and sustainable blood supply chain network is introduced in this study by considering both social and environmental factors of blood decomposition. In addition, some aspects of uncertainty are firstly considered to the problem in terms of both the amount of gathered blood from blood transfusion centers and the decomposition ratio in the blood decomposition center. Considering bi-objective programming in the developed network, the problem simultaneously considers optimizing the CO2 emission, balancing the flow of all utilized vehicles, penalty coefficient of non-visited centers, total costs of using all vehicles, and more importantly the social and environmental factors of blood decomposition. Therefore, the total cost is minimized by the first objective function along with the environmental factor of greenhouse gas emission while maximizing the social factor of blood decomposition is done by the second objective function which gathers and produces the maximum amount of blood sub-products for patients using stochastic programming. Several sensitivity analyses are conducted for a better implication of the problem in various conditions. The findings of the study suggest that expecting more social factors convey more costs in most cases. Therefore, blood supply chain managers must adjust their aims and scope to achieve the best-desired results for society.