A new formulation for the collection and delivery problem of biomedical specimen

Abstract: We study the collection and delivery problem of biomedical specimens (CDSP) with multiple trips, time windows, a homogeneous fleet, and the objective of minimizing total completion time of delivery requests. This is a prominent problem in healthcare logistics, where specimens (blood, plasma, urin etc.) collected from patients in doctor's offices and hospitals are transported to a central laboratory for advanced analysis. To the best of our knowledge, available exact solution approaches for CDSP have been able to solve only small instances with up to 9 delivery requests. In this paper, we propose a two-index mixed-integer programming formulation that, when used with an off-the-shelf solver, results in a fast exact solution approach. Computational experiments on a benchmark data set confirm that the proposed formulation outperforms both the state-of-the-art model and the state-of-the-art metaheuristic from the literature, solving 80 out of 168 benchmark instances to optimality, including a significant number of instances with 100 delivery requests.