Investigating the conflicts between different stakeholders’ preferences in a blood supply chain at emergencies: a trade-off between six objectives

Building and solving many-objective optimization models to tackle real-world problems is still very challenging in practical terms. A Blood supply chain (BSC) network is an especial case of the general supply chain usually investigated using single or multi-objective approaches. However, there are always many incompatible targets for this problem in the real world. This paper aims to deal with the problem of BSC network design in emergencies using a six-objective optimization framework. Such a model can appropriately meet and balance the expectations of different stakeholders and the BSC network, considering the immediate and dynamic requirements of a specific emergency event. To formulate the problem at hand, a new mathematical model is developed as a mixed-integer linear programming (MIP) model. Since the problem is strongly NP-hard, two recently developed solution algorithms called NSGA-III and FR-NSGA-II are adapted and used to solve the problem in a reasonable time. The proposed solution algorithms provide some proper trade-offs between different objectives that can be valuable for related managers. The result shows that a more stable Pareto-optimal solution can be produced using the FR-NSGA-II. Supplementary analysis indicates the superiority of the proposed approach compared to the previous studies in BSC network design.