Monday, March 19, 2012

Blood Supply Chains and Humanitarian Logistics


In my previous post, I pointed to a guest lecture on Disaster Communications, given in my Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare class at the Isenberg School of Management, by "the other" Professor Nagurney, my husband.

My students also had the privilege of learning about blood supply chains last week, both from an operations management perspective, as well as from a design (or redesign) operations research one.

The guest speaker on blood supply chains was one of my advanced doctoral students, Amir H. Masoumi, with whom I have co-authored two papers on blood supply chains. Amir has also taught the required Management Science course for our Operations Management majors and was nominated for a university-wide teaching award by the students.

Amir's presentation, "Supply Chain Network Operations Management and Design of a Sustainable Blood Banking System," was based on the two papers with additional material added to broaden the scope for the students and to bring issues of disasters and humanitarian logistics into this context. The framework that we developed for this most important perishable product in healthcare handles risk as well as demand uncertainty.

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, is now published online in the journal, Computational Management Science. Our paper, Supply Chain Network Design of a Sustainable Blood Banking System, Anna Nagurney and Amir H. Masoumi, is in press in the edited volume, Sustainable Supply Chains: Models, Methods and Public Policy Implications, T. Boone, V. Jayaraman, and R. Ganeshan, Editors, Springer, London, England, 2012. This book is in the International Series in Operations Research & Management Science.

The new course on Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare has been a wonderful experience for the students, the instructor, as well as the guest speakers.