Joint Decisions for Blood Collection and Platelet Inventory Control

The present study investigates the benefit of joint decision making regarding whole blood collection and platelet production at a blood center. We consider a blood center that faces two types of platelet demands, differing in their freshness requirements and shortage penalty costs. We fully characterize the structure of the optimal policy regarding whole blood collection, platelet production, and inventory issuing, rationing and disposal. We find that the optimal platelet production quantity in each period is nonincreasing in the inventory levels of platelets and whole blood but that interestingly, the optimal blood collection effort may increase with the on-hand platelet inventory level. We demonstrate with a real dataset that joint decision making leads to significant cost savings compared with separate decision making. The benefit is mainly derived from reduced blood collection and platelet production, better utilization of the collected whole blood, and reduced platelet shortage. For practical implementation, we develop a lookahead heuristic, which is shown to be very effective by numerical experiments.