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Appointment scheduling for blood donors in combination with walk-in donors

Dijkink, M. (2016) Appointment scheduling for blood donors in combination with walk-in donors.

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Abstract:Sanquin is a Dutch blood bank. At Sanquin whole blood donors come on walk-in basis. In the near future it is planned to make an online agenda system. Not all donors will come with an appointment. The aim is to have about 80% of the whole blood donors coming with an appointment, the remaining 20% keeps coming on walk-in basis. For the agenda system it has to be decided which time slots should be open for donors to make an appointment. Low waiting times are important to keep the donors satisfied. Therefore two waiting time models are made. The donation process of whole blood donors and plasma donors is partly the same, the donor streams are mixed. So plasma donors are also incorporated in the waiting time models. Plasma donors only come with appointment, this will stay the same in the feature. The first waiting time model models each phase of the donation process as a non-preemptive M/M/c queue with priorities. Plasma donors already have priority on whole blood donors. To stimulate appointment making whole blood donors with appointment will have priority on whole blood donors without appointment. The first waiting time model uses the Laplace-Stieltjes transform of the waiting time. To get the waiting time distribution the inverse Laplace-Stieltjes transform has to be calculated. This has to be done numerically, which gives a high computation time. This will be a problem when used in practice. Therefore a second waiting time model is made, that models each donor class per phase (of the donation process) as an M/M/1 queue. To keep the priorities capacity reservation is done. The results of the waiting time models are used to rate an appointment schedule. The lower the rate, the better the schedule. To find a good appointment schedule a heuristic is made to generate schedules. Appointment schedules are generated and evaluated until a good enough schedule has been found. For both waiting time models the assumption is made that the phases of the blood donation process are independent, which is not the case in practice. A simulation model is made to verify how good/bad this assumption is. Also a simulation model is made to get an indication of how the determined appointment schedule will work out in practice.
Item Type:Essay (Master)
Faculty:EEMCS: Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science
Subject:31 mathematics
Programme:Applied Mathematics MSc (60348)
Link to this item:https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/71694
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