Date of Award
5-21-2020
Publication Type
Master Thesis
Degree Name
M.A.Sc.
Department
Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering
Supervisor
Zbigniew Pasek
Rights
info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Abstract
The healing effects of human blood make it one of the essential, life-saving components in a variety of medical procedures. However, assuring timely and sufficient blood supply for use in life-critical medical procedures is one of the major challenges that most health care networks around the world are persistently facing and trying to resolve. Based on the WHO’s latest statistics, 107 out of 180 countries all around the world have an insufficient amount of blood units to meet their demands. For two years in the row (2018-19), Canadian Blood Services have called for 100,000 new donors to sign up in order to meet the anticipated demand for blood. The perishability of blood components and uncertainty in both donation and demand scale are two important reasons that contribute to the blood shortage. Due to the poor inventory planning, the high rate of discarded units is another worldwide issue that exists in the blood supply chain and needs to be urgently addressed. Canadian blood supply chain network consists of several organizational entities and each of them impacts the blood units’ inventory levels in its own, unique way. In this study, an integrated supply chain model has been considered, and it consists of three main networked organizations: 1. Mobile Collection Centers, 2. Blood Centers, and 3. Hospitals. The main goal of this research is to develop a mathematical optimization model that can improve the proposed supply chain’s performance by reducing its related costs, and the currently existing shortage rate from about 25% to less than 15%. Lateral Transshipment and Emergency Ordering are two main approaches that have been implemented in the proposed model in order to improve both performance and efficiency. The Greater Toronto Area (GTA) has been considered as the case study focus for this research, and both models have been applied in this case study. All the further necessary actions and recommendations would be taken based on the case study’s results.
Recommended Citation
Emadi, Parmis, "Blood Shortage Reduction by Deployment of Lateral Transshipment Approach" (2020). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 8332.
https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/etd/8332