Solving the Blood Assignment Problem for Hospital in Pontianak City, Indonesia using Ant Colony Optimization

Blood is considered a very valuable and rare commodity because there is no chemical process that can produce blood. In addition, blood also has a limited shelf life. When viewed from the demand side of blood, blood has a different number of requests for each day, week and month, while blood must always be available. The hospital blood bank is responsible for blood availability, safe transfusion, quality and adequate transfusion. The main challenge is how the blood bank can minimize the amount of blood wasted at the end of the time in the hospital blood bank due to overestimation. If there is blood that is wasted, it will be in vain, while the demand for blood occurs every day. In this study, Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm is applied to solve the problem of finding the best route, that is finding the route to get the highest number of rooms to be visited and what is the minimum amount of blood not used. In this study, samples were used for blood type O and blood type PRC. From the results of applying the ACO algorithm for Blood Assignment Problem (BAP), the minimum wastage value is 0 with the number of rooms visited being 8. By knowing the amount of blood wasted, this algorithm can be used to optimize blood supply so as to avoid wasting blood due to overestimation.