Blood Inventory Management: An Overview of Theory and Practice

Blood Inventory Management has attracted significant interest from the Operations Research profession during the last 15 years. A number of methodological contributions have been made in the areas of inventory theory and combinatoric optimization that can be of use to other products or systems. These contributions include the development of exact and approximate ordering and issuing policies for an inventory system, the analysis of LIFO or multi-product systems, and various forms of distribution scheduling. In addition, many of these results have been implemented, either as decision rules for efficient blood management in a hospital, or as decision support systems for hierarchical planning in a Regional Blood Center. In this paper we attempt a review of the recent Operations Research contributions to blood inventory management theory and practice. Whereas many problems have been solved, others remain open and new ones keep being created with advances in medical technology and practices. Our approach is not to present an exhaustive review of all the literature in the field, but rather to address several important issues from a unified perspective of theory and practice, and point out new areas for further research.