Platelets are critical blood products. The management of platelet inventory is particularly challenging due to its perishable nature with a short shelf-life. Motivated by a platelet inventory management problem at a two-location hospital system, we study how the wastage of platelets, and more...

Due to the importance, limited supply and perishable nature of blood products, effective management of blood collection is critical for high quality healthcare delivery. In this paper, working closely with the American Red Cross (ARC), we study a blood collection problem focusing on whole blood...

We analyze a resource allocation problem faced by Medical Surplus Recovery Organizations (MSROs) that recover medical surplus products to fulfill the needs of under-served healthcare facilities in developing countries. Due to the uncertain, uncontrollable supply and limited information about...

Problem definition: Faced with the challenge of serving beneficiaries with heterogeneous needs and under budget constrains, a number of nonprofit organizations (NPOs) have come up with an innovative solution: providing partially complete products or services to beneficiaries. We seek to...

In emerging economies, there is a growing number of farm equipment sharing platforms that connect smallholder farmers with tractor owners who are willing to fulfill farmers' requests for mechanization services. Due to the small farm sizes and the low digital literacy in rural areas of emerging...

Motivated by a platelet inventory management problem, we study periodic-review, fixed-lifetime perishable inventory systems where demand is a general stochastic process. The optimal solution for this problem is computationally intractable due to the “curse of dimensionality”. In this paper,...

Problem definition: We investigate the effectiveness of different Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) implementation models for pharmaceuticals. In particular, we study two viable and prevalent models: (i) Source Reduction (SR), where a form of fee upon sale is imposed on producers, and (ii)...

While China has participated in extensive global collaboration to reduce carbon emissions and combat global climate change, the country faces enormous pressure to ensure national energy security. Integrated energy services (IESs) in China are a systematic improvement and structural optimization...