Boosting symbiotic organism search algorithm with ecosystem service for dynamic blood allocation in blood banking system

ABSTRACT Blood is a valuable commodity in society due to its ability to save lives during crises. Furthermore, because of the scarcity of blood donors, blood assignment by blood banks requires meticulous planning and solid issuing policy. The multiple components of a blood banking system contribute to the complexity of maintaining an efficient structure for such a system. One particular aspect relates to the stochastic nature of the demand for blood units. This paper implements a mathematical model for a blood bank system in South Africa and additionally explores the possible implementation of a hybrid global optimisation metaheuristic approach for the efficient assignment of blood products in the blood bank system. The approximate optimisation method used is the hybridisation of the symbiotic organism search (SOS) algorithm and a pre-processing ecosystem services (PES) techniques. In order to show the practicability of the model and evaluate the accuracy and robustness of the newly proposed hybrid algorithm, several numerical computations were performed using synthetically generated datasets that fall within the initial blood volume bounds of 500 to 20, 000. The experimental results indicate that the hybrid symbiotic organisms search ecosystem services optimisation algorithm offers better solutions for blood allocation under a dynamic environment than does the standard symbiotic organism search algorithm and other previously proposed hybrid versions of the SOS methods.