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The University of Southampton
CORMSIS Centre for Operational Research, Management Sciences and Information Systems

CORMSIS Seminar "Inventory-Responsive Donor Management Policy: A Tandem Queueing Network Model" - Gar Goei Loke Event

Time:
14:00
Date:
28 October 2021
Venue:
Please email Huan Yu for a link to the virtual seminar

For more information regarding this event, please email Huan Yu at Huan.Yu@southampton.ac.uk .

Event details

In the blood donor management problem, the blood bank incentivizes donors to donate, given blood inventory levels. We consider the realistic context of blood perishability, observation period between donations, variability in donor arrivals and drop-outs, and different classes of donors. In such a setting, we propose an optimization model to optimize the number of donors of different classes that are to receive the incentivization. Our model simultaneously accounts for the dynamics in the blood inventory and the donor's donation process, as a coupled queueing network. We adopt the Pipeline Queue (Bandi and Loke 2018) paradigm, but require new methodology to deal with the coupled dynamics of blood inventory and donors, in order to arrive at a tractable convex reformulation. Numerical results indicate sensitivity of the optimal incentivization policy to donor responsiveness, rate of new donors, and level of demand for blood. Our simulations also demonstrate that even at times of ample supply in the inventory, it may still be optimal to incentivize a small proportion of donors to donate. Our work has potential wider applications in supply chains with perishable inventory.

Speaker information

Dr Gar Goei Loke, an Assistant Professor with the Supply Chain Management section at the Department of Technology and Operations Management, Rotterdam School of Management. His research interests are in the application of robust optimization to service operations management. Previously, he has spent 5 years in the Singapore Public Service, working as and managing teams of data scientists and operations researchers. He continues to provide consultancy to the Government Technology Agency, Singapore today.

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