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: | Ganesh K, Narendran T T, Anbuudayasankar S P |
Keywords: | health services, optimization: simulated annealing, combinatorial optimization |
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.