Blockchain-enabled sustainable blood supply network design
摘要
The blood supply chain plays a critical role in healthcare, and the integration of Blockchain technology holds significant promise for enhancing sustainability. The objective of this paper is to analyze the impact of Blockchain technology on the blood supply chain sustainability. The proposed model assists decision-makers in assessing economic sustainability indicators with and without Blockchain, helping them balance sustainability and traceability, which is a key feature provided by Blockchain. The proposed blood supply chain model incorporates Blockchain technology and smart contracts. Besides, linear programming is used for the formulation and the CPLEX solver for the resolution. Sensitivity analysis assesses the model’s robustness by focusing on the impact of Blockchain and smart contract costs. This analysis provides insights into how these costs affect economic sustainability versus traceability trade-offs, contributing to the development of an effective and cost-efficient blood supply chain model. The results of the study yielded that implementing Blockchain technology in the blood supply chain can enhance its efficiency and potentially result in substantial cost reductions when the costs of Blockchain and smart contract related costs are justifiable.