Platelet Inventory Management with Approximate Dynamic Programming

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Abouee-Mehrizi, Hossein, Mirjalili, Mahdi, Sarhangian, Vahid
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Abouee-Mehrizi, Hossein
Mirjalili, Mahdi
Sarhangian, Vahid
author_facet Abouee-Mehrizi, Hossein
Mirjalili, Mahdi
Sarhangian, Vahid
contents We study a stochastic perishable inventory control problem with endogenous (decision-dependent) uncertainty in shelf-life of units. Our primary motivation is determining ordering policies for blood platelets. Determining optimal ordering quantities is a challenging task due to the short maximum shelf-life of platelets (3-5 days after testing) and high uncertainty in daily demand. We formulate the problem as an infinite-horizon discounted Markov Decision Process (MDP). The model captures salient features observed in our data from a network of Canadian hospitals and allows for fixed ordering costs. We show that with uncertainty in shelf-life, the value function of the MDP is non-convex and key structural properties valid under deterministic shelf-life no longer hold. Hence, we propose an Approximate Dynamic Programming (ADP) algorithm to find approximate policies. We approximate the value function using a linear combination of basis functions and tune the parameters using a simulation-based policy iteration algorithm. We evaluate the performance of the proposed policy using extensive numerical experiments in parameter regimes relevant to the platelet inventory management problem. We further leverage the ADP algorithm to evaluate the impact of ignoring shelf-life uncertainty. Finally, we evaluate the out-of-sample performance of the ADP algorithm in a case study using real data and compare it to the historical hospital performance and other benchmarks. The ADP policy can be computed online in a few minutes and results in more than 50% lower expiry and shortage rates compared to the historical performance. In addition, it performs better or as well as an exact policy that ignores uncertainty in shelf-life and becomes hard to compute for larger instance of the problem.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2307_09395
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Platelet Inventory Management with Approximate Dynamic Programming
Abouee-Mehrizi, Hossein
Mirjalili, Mahdi
Sarhangian, Vahid
Systems and Control
We study a stochastic perishable inventory control problem with endogenous (decision-dependent) uncertainty in shelf-life of units. Our primary motivation is determining ordering policies for blood platelets. Determining optimal ordering quantities is a challenging task due to the short maximum shelf-life of platelets (3-5 days after testing) and high uncertainty in daily demand. We formulate the problem as an infinite-horizon discounted Markov Decision Process (MDP). The model captures salient features observed in our data from a network of Canadian hospitals and allows for fixed ordering costs. We show that with uncertainty in shelf-life, the value function of the MDP is non-convex and key structural properties valid under deterministic shelf-life no longer hold. Hence, we propose an Approximate Dynamic Programming (ADP) algorithm to find approximate policies. We approximate the value function using a linear combination of basis functions and tune the parameters using a simulation-based policy iteration algorithm. We evaluate the performance of the proposed policy using extensive numerical experiments in parameter regimes relevant to the platelet inventory management problem. We further leverage the ADP algorithm to evaluate the impact of ignoring shelf-life uncertainty. Finally, we evaluate the out-of-sample performance of the ADP algorithm in a case study using real data and compare it to the historical hospital performance and other benchmarks. The ADP policy can be computed online in a few minutes and results in more than 50% lower expiry and shortage rates compared to the historical performance. In addition, it performs better or as well as an exact policy that ignores uncertainty in shelf-life and becomes hard to compute for larger instance of the problem.
title Platelet Inventory Management with Approximate Dynamic Programming
topic Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.09395