Multi‐objective optimization of transporting blood products by routing UAVs: the case of Istanbul

Abstract Since the blood is necessary for surgical operations, disease treatments, chronic disorders, and traumatic accidents, it is staminal to manage the flow in the supply chain of blood products from donors to patients that can save lives. Therefore, this paper focuses on transporting blood products from distribution centers to hospitals in cities by routing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The problem includes two objective functions as minimizing the used number of UAVs and their total travel distances, simultaneously by considering range, payload weight, and payload volume of UAVs. The problem also covers the blood product demands of hospitals and the supply capacities of distribution centers. A multi‐objective integer programming (MOIP) model and three multi‐objective metaheuristics are designed to solve the defined problem. To test the effectiveness of the proposed methods, real‐life blood product demands of hospitals in Istanbul for the year 2019 are obtained from the Turkish Red Crescent and several scenarios are created as the case study. In scenarios, two types of vertical take‐off and landing UAVs are considered, the MOIP is developed by using ILOG, solved via CPLEX, and the metaheuristics are coded in MATLAB. The results reveal that the proposed methods can find good solutions for the problem in acceptable CPU times.