Social engineering optimiser for a supply chain network design for blood products in a fuzzy environment

The management of the blood supply chain is one of the most challenging decision problems for the relevant stakeholders. Notably, the blood is not a normal commodity and there is no substitute. On the other hand, with the increase in diseases, natural and abnormal accidents, the demand of the blood products has been increased. Accordingly, there is a great interest in the blood supply chains regarding its absence of timely response; it leads to substantial costs of human mortality. This paper proposes a new extension to the blood supply chain network design problem as a four-level, multi-product and multi-cycle centralised supply chain network by using a fuzzy optimisation model to minimise the transmission time of the entire network which is still scarce in the literature. The applicability of this model is proven by a case of crisis logistics in Tehran, Iran. Since the proposed model is NP-hard, there are many studies to develop new heuristics and metaheuristics. As applied already to several optimisation problems, the social engineering optimiser (SEO) as a recent successful metaheuristic has been never employed in this research area. Therefore, another contribution of this study is to apply the SEO and to compare it with well-known algorithms from the literature.