A Metaheuristic Approach for Biological Sample Transportation in Healthcare

In this paper, a real-world transportation problem is addressed, concerning the collection and the transportation of biological sample tubes from draw centers to the main hospital in Bologna, Italy. Blood and other biological samples are collected in different centers during morning hours. Then, they are transported to the main hospital for their analysis by a fleet of vehicles. Each sample has a given lifetime, i.e., a deadline. If a sample cannot arrive to the hospital before the deadline either is discarded or a stabilization process must be carried out in on of the dedicated facilities called Spoke Centers. After stabilization, a sample can be delivered to the main hospital by a new deadline. Transfers of samples are allowed at Spoke Centers. If a sample is delivered by a vehicle to a Spoke Center to be processed, it can be picked up from the Spoke Center after the stabilization by a different vehicle for the delivery to the main hospital. An Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search Algorithm is developed and tested. Computational experiments on different sets of instances based on real-life data are presented.