Networks Against Time and Thanks to the Penn State School of Graduate Professional Studies

I have returned from the Philly area. I flew back to Bradley Airport at Hartford/Springfield this afternoon via USAIR and actually had legroom and a very pleasant flight.

Yesterday evening, I delivered a talk, "Networks Against Time: From Food to Pharma," at Penn State's School of Graduate Professional Studies. My host was Dr. Patrick Qiang, who is also my co-author of the book, Fragile Networks: Identifying Vulnerabilities and Synergies in an Uncertain World.

 

 The campus had done a super job publicizing my talk.

I focused on models that we had developed and are synthesized and summarized in our new book: Networks Against Time: Supply Chain Analytics for Perishable Products using optimization and game theory in a generalized network framework with arc multipliers to capture the physics/chemistry of the perishability of products over space and time from food to medical nuclear products to pharmaceuticals.

In my presentation, towards the end, I included a slide on our latest paper, which is a supply chain network model for disaster relief.


The audience was terrific -- interesting questions -- thanks -- and some came from Delaware and Maryland. It was wonderful to speak to an audience of academics and practitioners and even the INFORMS Philadelphia Chapter had advertised my presentation so it was great to have representatives from the chapter also in attendance.

Thanks to all those who came to my presentation and thanks to this Penn State campus for the hospitality!

I even got to meet with its Chancellor, Dr. Ctraig Edelbrock.

As I wrote in my previous blogpost, We Must Go On, I dedicated my talk to the Boston Marathon bombing victims. I had written that one friend was not accounted for. Since the post was written, I have heard that, at the 25th mile, which she had reached at just over 4 hours, she was told to stop running. This was good news on a horrific day filled with tragedy and complete senselessness and cruelty. 

On my flight today I especially appreciated the OpEd in The New York Times written by Thomas L. Friedman, Bring on the Next Marathon, And, the UMass Amherst sports teams doctor, Dr. Pierre Rouzier, was at the Boston Marathon as a medical volunteer -- his fifth time, and he assisted victims, as reported in today's Daily Hampshire Gazette. Also, my husband's cousin, is a faculty member at Harvard Medical School and an emergency room physician at Mass General Hospital.

Speaking of Chancellors and University Presidents, as a Radcliffe Fellow, I am a Harvard alumna, and we were emailed a message by the President of Harvard, Dr. Drew Gilpin Faust. In her letter, she concluded with: The Boston Marathon is an event that demands resilience. As we struggle to make sense of yesterday’s events, I urge all of us to draw on the strength of the Harvard community and the support of colleagues and friends.

The Chancellor of UMass Amherst, Dr. Kumble Subbaswamy sent out a message to UMass Amherst.

His concluding words in it were: In the days ahead we must stand together as a community to extend our support to all affected by this terrible tragedy.

Such events affect all of us as citizens of the free world.

Our Highly Downloaded Blood Supply Chain Network Paper is Now Available for Free Download -- Thanks to Computational Management Science and Springer

I do like it when a journals and publishers are proactive and innovative.

It also feels good, as a researcher, that the papers that you write and are published are actually read!

The paper, "Supply Chain Network Operations Management of a Blood Banking System with Cost and Risk Minimization," that I co-authored with my doctoral students, Amir H, Masoumi, and Min Yu, is now one of the most highly downloaded articles in the journal Computational Management Science.

And Springer, the journal's publisher, has made the article available for free download.


Min Yu has received her PhD, since the article was published, and is now an Assistant Professor and Pamplin Fellow at the Pamplin School of Business at the University of Portland in Oregon.

Amir and I also co-authored the paper, Supply Chain Network Design of a Sustainable Blood Banking System,which appears in the book,  Sustainable Supply Chains: Models, Methods and Public Policy Implications (2012), T. Boone, V. Jayaraman, and R. Ganeshan, Editors, Springer, London, England, pp 49-72.

In these papers, we use some of the ideas on generalized network models going back to the work that I did on dynamic spatial price equilibrium models with gains and losses with Jay Aronson in which the product flow volumes  can change over space and time because of product perishability (losses) or successful investments (gains).

Optimizing Blood Supply Chains for Healthcare

Our paper, Supply Chain Network Operations Management of a Blood Banking System with Cost and Risk Minimization, Anna Nagurney, Amir H. Masoumi, and Min Yu, now appears in the journal, Computational Management Science 9(2): (2012) pp 205-231.

It is in the April 2012 issue of Computational Management Science and is in a special issue edited by Professor Georg Pflug.

In this paper, we focus on a specific perishable product – that of human blood – and the optimization of a blood banking network system. Nahmias (1982) claimed that: “The interest among researchers in perishable inventory problems has been sparked primarily by problems of blood bank management. Some of the possible reasons for this interest might be that blood bank research has been supported by public funds.” Prastacos (1984) provided a review, to that date, of blood inventory management, from both theoretical and practical perspectives. Whether or not Nahmias’ statement is still valid – considering all the recent concerns about the safety of perishable products, blood bank management from a supply chain network perspective merits a fresh and updated approach.

This topic is especially timely today, since it has been reported that the number of disasters and the number of people affected by disasters has been growing over the past decade and blood is certainly a life-saving product (cf. Nagurney and Qiang (2009)). Blood service operations are a key component of the healthcare system all over the world. According to the American Red Cross, over 39,000 donations are needed everyday in the United States, alone, and the blood supply is frequently reported to be just 2 days away from running out. Of 1,700 hospitals participating in a survey in 2007, a total of 492 reported cancellations of elective surgeries on one or more days due to blood shortages. While for many hospitals, the reported number of blood-related delays was not significant, hospitals with as many days of surgical delays as 50 or even 120 have been observed. Furthermore, in 2006, the national estimate for the number of units of whole blood and all components outdated by blood centers and hospitals was 1,276,000 out of 15,688,000 units (Whitaker et al. (2007)). Considering also the ever-increasing hospital cost of a unit of red blood cells with a 6.4% increase from 2005 to 2007 further highlights the criticality of this perishable, lifesaving product.

 
In the US, this criticality has become more of an issue in the Northeastern and Southwestern states since this cost is meaningfully higher compared to that of the Southeastern and Central states. Moreover, hospitals were responsible for approximately 90% of the outdates, with this volume of medical waste imposing discarding costs to the already financially-stressed hospitals (The New York Times (2010)).

In this paper, we developed a generalized network optimization model for the complex supply chain of human blood, which is a life-saving, perishable product. In particular, we considered a regionalized blood banking system consisting of collection sites, testing and processing facilities, storage facilities, distribution centers, as well as points of demand, which, typically, include hospitals.

Our multicriteria system-optimization approach on generalized networks with arc multipliers captures many of the critical issues associated with blood supply chains such as the determination of the optimal allocations, and the induced supply-side risk, as well as the induced cost of discarding the waste, while satisfying the uncertain demands as closely as possible.

The framework that we present in this paper is also applicable, with appropriate modifications, to the
optimization of other supply chains of perishable products.


The complete analysis, along with references, can be found in our paper.