A resilient donor arrival policy for blood

This study introduces a new methodology for calling blood donors by integrating perishability and dual sourcing. It is shown that the proposed donor-arrival policy could replace the current procedure, which requires frequent adjustments to the number of calls. We show that both donor-arrival (current and proposed) policies could decrease shortages and wastages of blood, while only the proposed policy allows a longer lead-time for arrivals and planning operations, and could significantly increase the blood center’s resilience to errors made in forecasting. The proposed policy is also shown to be more effective than existing blood substitution policies in reducing wastages and shortages (with nearly zero shortages for any given admissible safety inventory). The proposed policy is designed and validated using real-life data from a large blood center in New York State.