A Multistage Algorithm for Blood Banking Supply Chain Allocation Problem

This paper proposes an efficient method for allocating a number of blood centers to a set of hospitals to minimize the total distance between the hospitals and the blood centers,based on the concept of graph partitioning (p-median methodology) and metaheuristic optimization algorithms. for this purpose,a weighted graph is first constructed for the network denoted by g0. a coarsening process is then performed to match the edges in n stages. then,the enhanced colliding bodies (ecbo) algorithm is applied to the coarsened model to decompose it into p subdomains by using a p-median methodology. in the present problem,p is the number of blood centers to be allocated for the hospitals. the results indicate that the proposed algorithm performs quite satisfactory from both computational time and optimality points of view. © 2016,iran university of science and technology.