Uma abordagem de redes de filas para análise de cadeia de suprimentos de sangue

Abstract

Blood is essential to human life as it is used in various procedures that require blood replacement. Effective management of the blood supply chain is critical to ensuring appropriate patient care and minimizing waste. However, the perishable nature of blood products makes this management even more challenging. Operations Research (OR) is a valuable tool to deal with this complexity. However, few studies have used OR techniques to analyze Brazilian blood supply chains. The objective of this work is to develop an approach based on queue networks to evaluate blood supply chains, focusing on the configuration of Brazilian blood networks. To this end, an algorithm was developed to analyze the possible combinations of quantities and locations of production facilities, using the approximate decomposition method to evaluate the performance measures of each analyzed configuration. The results show the suggested configuration of production stations for each number of units installed, taking into account the shortest average transport time of blood bags. The results also indicate an increase in lead time as the centralization of production units increases and suggest a pattern of eliminating production units in configurations, even when all configuration combinations are tested. In addition, one of the units is included in all the best configurations achieved and another unit only in the configuration that uses total decentralization. Alternative scenarios based on population growth projections were also analyzed and indicated the need to increase the collection in the coming years in order to maintain the inventory levels of the original scenario, suggesting the need to adopt strategies such as collection campaigns, setting up units in other municipalities and using mobile units.