Title: Evolving cost-effective routing of vehicles for blood bank logistics

Authors: K. Ganesh; T.T. Narendran; S.P. Anbuudayasankar

Addresses: Supply Chain Management – Center of Competence, McKinsey Knowledge Center, McKinsey and Company, DLF Plaza Tower, DLF City Phase 1, Gurgaon 122 002, Haryana, India ' Department of Management Studies, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai-600 036, India ' Department of Mechanical Engineering, Amrita School of Engineering, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore – 641112, India

Abstract: The problem of distributing and collecting blood for a public healthcare system is addressed in this paper. The problem is modelled as a vehicle routing problem with delivery and collection. It is an NP-hard problem that is not amenable to easy solution procedures. A heuristic proposed to find good initial solutions as inputs to an intensive search with meta-heuristics. Cluster of nodes to be visited is formed first. The nodes in a cluster is aligned to a route and then assigned a vehicle to each cluster. Using this solution as input, an intensive search, combining genetic algorithms (GA) and simulated annealing (SA) is carried out. At a significantly enhanced speed of search, encouraging results for test problems are obtained.

Keywords: global VRP; vehicle routing problem; blood collection; blood distribution; genetic algorithms; simulated annealing; cost-effective routing; blood bank logistics; blood banks.

DOI: 10.1504/IJLSM.2014.061013

International Journal of Logistics Systems and Management, 2014 Vol.17 No.4, pp.381 - 415

Published online: 21 Jun 2014 *

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