A MILP Model for Biological Sample Transportation in Healthcare

In this paper, a real-world transportation problem is addressed, concerning the collection and the transportation of blood and biological sample tubes from draw centers to a main hospital. Blood and other biological samples are collected in different centers during morning hours and have to be transported to the main hospital by a fleet of vehicles. Each sample has a given lifetime, i.e., a deadline. If a sample can not arrive to the hospital before the deadline either is discarded or a stabilization process must be carried out in dedicated centers. After stabilization, a sample can be delivered to the main hospital by a new deadline. A time-indexed Mixed Integer Linear Programming formulation of the problem is provided and tested on different instances generated from real-life data.