Red blood cells consumption: an optimization method

Official URL: https://dx.doi.org/10.1109/IIIEC.2019.8720647

Optimal red blood cells (RBCs)consumption management as an invaluable product can contribute noticeably to communities' healthcare. Therefore, the main purpose of this research is to help the medical community and the human community in providing fast and timely blood products at the lowest cost. Blood products' life are taken into account since ordering policies are depended on the time of inventory. For each hospital, a new decision is made for RBCs production for the whole day. The decision-making process is repeated the next day with respect to the inventory status. Markov decision-making process is used as a decision-making tool for blood inventory problem. We used MATLAB 2016b software to solve the Markov decision-making for RBCs with sequential approximation algorithm. Real-life data are used to investigate the model. Obtained results after 278256 iterations show that 13.19%, 45.13% and 41.68% of costs are related to (LIFO-FIFO), (LIFO-LIFO)and (FIFO-FIFO)policies, respectively. By analyzing the different types of costs and comparing the policies, it is believed that (LIFO-LIFO)policy is better than other two policies and cumulated costs in this policy is lower than other ones in long time.