Platelet products are both expensive and have very short shelf lives. As usage rates for platelets are highly variable, the effective management of platelet demand and supply is very important yet challenging. The primary goal of this paper is to present an efficient forecasting model for platelet demand at Canadian Blood Services (CBS). To accomplish this goal, four different demand forecasting methods, ARIMA (Auto Regressive Moving Average), Prophet, lasso regression (least absolute shrinkage and selection operator) and LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory) networks are utilized and evaluated. We use a large clinical dataset for a centralized blood distribution centre for four hospitals in Hamilton, Ontario, spanning from 2010 to 2018 and consisting of daily platelet transfusions along with information such as the product specifications, the recipients' characteristics, and the recipients' laboratory test results. This study is the first to utilize different methods from statistical time series models to data-driven regression and a machine learning technique for platelet transfusion using clinical predictors and with different amounts of data. We find that the multivariate approaches have the highest accuracy in general, however, if sufficient data are available, a simpler time series approach such as ARIMA appears to be sufficient. We also comment on the approach to choose clinical indicators (inputs) for the multivariate models.

Stability analysis consists of identifying conditions under which the number of jobs in a system is guaranteed to remain bounded over time. To date, such long-run performance guarantees have not been available for periodic approaches to dynamic scheduling problems. However, stability has been extensively studied in queueing theory. In this paper, we introduce stability to the dynamic scheduling literature and demonstrate that stability guarantees can be obtained for methods that build the schedule for a dynamic problem by periodically solving static deterministic sub-problems. Specifically, we analyze the stability of two dynamic environments: a two-machine flow shop, which has received significant attention in scheduling research, and a polling system with a flow-shop server, an extension of systems typically considered in queueing. We demonstrate that, among stable policies, methods based on periodic optimization of static schedules may achieve better mean flow times than traditional queueing approaches.