Figure 1

1.  Location-Allocation Problem for Blood Service Facility in Thailand PornpimolChaiwuttisak1*, Dr HonoraSmith1, Dr YueWu1, Tassanee Sakuldamrongpanich2, Dr Somchai Pathomsiri3 1 CORMSIS, University of Southampton, 2 National Blood Centre, the Thai Red Cross Society,3Civil and Environmental Engineering department, Mahidol University * Corresponding author. e-mail address (): pc12g09@soton.ac.uk Introduction Problem Background In principle, blood service centres have been established to The Thai Red Cross Society (TRCS) has difficulty building new blood centres (see in Figure 1) with full functions because setup costs are expensive. Current amounts of donated blood are insufficient to meet demand. More fixed collection sites are proposed to make easy access for donors. Some sites may perform preparation and storage for blood that hospitals can receive directly. However, location decisions have impact on the blood supply chain and logistics. Furthermore, the investment budget is limited for this non-profit organisation. There is one National Blood Centre (NBC) at Bangkok and twelve Regional Blood Centres (RBCs) in the different provinces over the country.  Same Quality Standard andAssureBloodSafety  Objectives of Study Figure 1 We present an Integer Programming model for a location-allocation problem,“Max donor supply –Min distribution distance”, based on two classical facility location models: Maximum Covering model + p-median model The weighted objectives of the model minimise the demand weighted distance to supply blood to hospitals and maximise the quantity of expected blood donors from volunteers in order to find the optimal sites for two kinds of facilities (see in Figure 1) to serve blood: Formulation Results and Discussions Figure 2 • Minimise • + • + • Subject to Figure 3 We use equally weighted objective components after discussion with the National Blood Centre. For lower budgets, up to 60 million Baht, only the less costly rooms for collection only are located. At higher budget, the more costly rooms for collection and distribution also can be located. In particular, one site in the northern region, Chiang Rai, and one site in the southern region, Chumphon, are recommended as distribution centres illustrated in Figure 3.From Figure 2, values of the first objective decrease while the others increase when budgets are higher. Future work • where , , , , , denote decision variables [0,1] for type 1 (collection site) and type 2 (collection and distribution site), and are total of fixed costs,denotes blood usage of hospital , denotes quantity of donated blood from the site ,and and are weight scores for objectives. Future work will be to study in detail the logistics of blood supply in one particular region, in the north of Thailand. References  William P. Pierskalla (2004), Supply chain management of blood banks, in: M.L. Brandeau, F. Sainfort, W.P. Pierskalla(eds.), Operations Research and Health Care: A Handbook of Methods and Applications, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004, 103-145 Acknowledgement  We acknowledge the support of 1) The Royal Thai Government in providing a Ph.D. scholarship for this research 2) National Blood Centre, The Thai Red Cross Society in providing data  Organization Participation 