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PubMed ID: 32613350 Blood is a key resource in all health care systems, usually drawn from voluntary donors. We focus on the operations management in blood collection centers, which is a key step to guarantee an adequate blood supply and a good quality of service to donors, by addressing the so-called Blood Donation Appointment Scheduling problem. Its goal is to employ appointment scheduling to balance the production of blood units between days, in order to provide a reasonably constant supply to transfusion centers and hospitals, and reduce non-alignments between physicians' working times and donor arrivals at the collection center. We consider a two-phase solution framework taken from the literature, in which a deterministic linear programming model preallocates time slots to different blood types and a prioritization policy assigns the preallocated slots to the donors when they make a reservation. However, the problem is stochastic in nature and requires consideration of the uncertain arrivals of non-booked donors. In this work, to include the uncertain arrivals, we propose three stochastic counterparts of the preallocation model based on a risk-neutral objective and two risk-averse objectives, respectively, where the Conditional Value-at-Risk is considered as the risk measure in the last two methods. The resulting stochastic frameworks have been tested considering the historical data of one of the largest Italian collection centers, the Milan Department of the "Associazione Volontari Italiani Sangue" (AVIS). Results show the effectiveness of the stochastic models, especially the mean-risk one, and the need to include the uncertainty of arrivals in order to better balance the production of blood units. Publisher's Version

Blood is fundamental in several care treatments and surgeries, and plays a crucial role in the health care system. It is a limited resource, as it can be produced only by donors and its shelf life is short; thus, the blood donation (BD) system aims at providing adequate supply of blood units to transfusion centers and hospitals. An effective collection of blood units from donors is fundamental for adequately feeding the entire BD system and optimizing blood usage. However, despite its relevance, donation scheduling is only marginally addressed in the literature. In this paper we consider the Blood Donation Appointment Scheduling (BDAS) problem, aiming at balancing the production of the different blood types among days in order to provide a quite constant feeding of blood units to the BD system. We propose a framework for the appointment reservation that accounts for both booked donors and donors arriving without a reservation. It consists of an offline Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model for preallocating time slots to blood types, and an online prioritization policy to assign a preallocated slot when the donor calls to make the reservation. © 2017 Elsevier B.V.