Evolving cost-effective routing of vehicles for blood bank logistics

Evolving cost-effective routing of vehicles for blood bank logistics

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Article ID: iaor2014577
Volume: 17
Issue: 4
Start Page Number: 381
End Page Number: 415
Publication Date: May 2014
Journal: International Journal of Logistics Systems and Management
Authors: , ,
Keywords: health services, optimization: simulated annealing, combinatorial optimization
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.

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