Blood Ordering Policies With Blood Complex Characteristics

Blood is an important part of the medical and health system,and is a medical necessity to treat diseases and save patients' lives.The management of blood is the top priority in the public health management in China.The state has gradually shifted its attention from the quality and safety of blood to the matching of blood supply and demand.The matching of blood supply and demand is inseparable from blood supply chain management.Therefore,scientific and reasonable blood supply chain management will be the focus and difficulty.However,the inherent complex characteristics of blood products and the typical characteristics of blood supply chain increase the risk of blood at the supply side,demand side and inventory side,raise the difficulty of blood supply chain management,and bring new challenges to blood center and hospital managers.Therefore,the study on the theory and method of blood supply chain management with full consideration of the complex characteristics of blood have important theoretical significance and practical value.Based on the developing trend of the blood supply chain management theory and management practice,and in accordance with the actual operation situation faced to the blood supply chain management,this dissertation focuses on blood complex traits,and constructes the blood supply chain management models respectively with considering blood stochastic and heterogeneous demand,limited life cycle,and random supply,by using the theories and methods of dynamic programming,stochastic inventory theory,and numerical simulation.We study optimal blood ordering decisions.The main research contents and conclusions are as follows:First of all,the blood ordering policies with considering stochastic and heterogeneous demand of emergency are studied.In this section,a two-stage blood supply chain consisting of a hospital and a blood center is studied.The hospital faces heterogeneous demands with different priorities.Two optimization models of blood supply chain based on the degrees of blood shortage,namely replenishment for emergency demand only and replenishment for both demands,are constructed,and the optimal collection and blood order policies is given.On this basis,the effects of replenishment strategy and emergency demand fluctuation are discussed.The research shows that there exists a unique optimal blood ordering policy,which is an increasing function of unit demand shortage cost and unit replenishment cost,and a decreasing function of unit dispose cost.Under the strategy of replenishing the emergency platelet demand only,the optimal collection strategy of the blood center is a two-stage policy,which depends on the hospital's blood order quantity,emergency stochastic demand distribution,unit shortage and outdate cost of the blood center,unit replenishment cost and other parameters.Under the strategy of replenishment for both emergency and regular platelet demand,the emergency demand stochastic distribution and cost parameters determine the feasible collection policy,while finally the expected total cost determines the optimal collection policy.Under the strategy of replenishing both emergency and regular platelet demand,the optimal blood order quantity of the hospital is always the lowest,and the optimal collection quantiy of the blood center is always the highest.For the entire blood supply chain,the strategy of replenishing both emergency and regular platelet demand not only minimizes the total expected cost,but also minimizes the expected shortage.Secondly,the blood ordering policies with considering random supply and heterogeneous demand of freshness are studied.In this section,under the circumstance of the unreliable fresh blood supply and with considering blood substitution,we examine the hospital's joint blood ordering policies and discuss the effect of the blood substitute,unreliable blood supply,and the blood demand fluctuation.The research shows that there exits unique optimal joint ordering policies for fresh blood and non-fresh blood.The blood substitution strategy is conducive to providing higher service level,reducing the risk of blood shortage and expiration,and thus cutting down the overall cost of the hospital.When the reliability of the fresh blood supply is low or high,the subsittion performance is the best.At this point,the hospital can provide the highest service level at the lowest cost.Generally speaking,increased blood demand fluctuation will lead to increased cost.The increased fluctuation of fresh blood demand prompts hospital to increase the blood order to maintain a high service level.However,the increased fluctuation of blood demand without preference to freshness will lead to a low service level.Finally,the blood ordering policies with cosindering random supply and multiperiod lifetime are studied.In this chapter,three different life cycles,namely one-period lifetime,two-period lifetime and long lifetime,are considered,and the blood inventory management model of multi-cycle dynamic programming is constructed to study the optimal blood ordering policy,and the influence of blood lifetime and random supply is discussed.The results show that: in the one-period lifetime model,there exits a unique optimal inventory level,which is also the order point and satisfies a base stock policy.In the two-period lifetime model,the order point is neither the optimal inventory level nor satisfies a base stock policy.Instead,the optimal inventory level fluctuates and depends on the initial inventory level.Therefore,the optimal inventory level is not a fixed orderup-to level,and futher it will not exceed the order point.In the long lifetime model,the blood order point of each period exists and is unique.The order point is the optimal inventory level and satisfies the basic stock policy.Comparative analysis shows that the order point of one-period lifetime is always lower than that of two-period or long lifetime.Given a same initial inventory level,the longer the lifetime is,the higher the optimal inventory level will be.The size of order points is only related to various cost parameters and stochastic demand,and is not affected by random supply.When the reliability of blood supply decreases,blood supply chain will increase blood orders to hedge against random fluctuations of blood supply,so as to reduce the risk of blood shortage.