Optimal Management of Donor Milk Banks

母乳是一种动态的生物活性液体，为婴儿，特别是早产儿提供了重要的营养和药用优势。母乳中含有数百种抗体和其他因素，可以保护婴儿免受危及生命的新生儿感染和疾病。然而，许多母亲无法为婴儿提供足够的母乳，原因有很多，包括缺乏或哺乳不足，后者对早产婴儿的母亲来说尤其严重。因此，捐赠的母乳，通过非营利性母乳银行收集和分配，是对那些无法选择母亲自己的母乳的婴儿的标准护理。尽管美国每年分发的黄金超过200万盎司，但需求远远大于供应。此外，母乳银行涉及许多复杂的操作过程。因此，这一日益增长的设施网络被广泛认为非常需要支持。该奖项旨在通过优化这一宝贵稀缺资源的处理、存储、分配和优先分配来提供这种支持。这项研究的成果将通过改善医疗成果、缩短住院时间和挽救生命来造福社会。该研究项目的具体目标是优化如何将不同捐赠者的母乳混合在一起，如何履行医院订单和门诊处方，以及如何优先考虑接受者。这些决策过程将被制定为大规模的多阶段随机程序，并将使用来自多个来源的数据进行校准。混合决策将被建模为一个多阶段随机混合整数计划，这是一类以非常难以解决而闻名的问题，但却表现出吸引人的结构。患者优先级决策将被建模为一个多阶段随机凸计划，这些决策过程的一个雄心勃勃的组合将被建模为一个多阶段随机混合整数凸计划。总的来说，这项工作的主要智力优点在于应用程序的及时性和新颖性（即母乳库操作），以及在解决模型时将克服的建模和算法挑战。

Human breast milk is a dynamic, bioactive fluid that provides crucial nutritional and medicinal advantages to infants, especially those born prematurely. Breast milk contains hundreds of antibodies and other factors that protect babies from life-threatening neonatal infections and diseases. Many mothers, however, cannot provide adequate breast milk for their infants for a host of reasons including absent or insufficient lactation, the latter of which is especially acute for mothers of premature infants. Therefore, donated breast milk, collected and dispensed via non-profit milk banks, is the standard of care for infants whose mother's own milk is not a viable option. Despite the fact that over two million ounces are dispensed annually in the US, demand far outweighs supply. Moreover, milk banks involve many complex operational processes. Hence, this growing network of facilities is widely regarded as being in great need of support. This award aims to provide such support by optimizing the processing, storage, dispensing and prioritized allocation of this precious scarce resource. The outcomes of the research will benefit society through better medical outcomes, shorter hospital stays and saved lives. The specific objectives of this research project are to optimize how milk from different donors is blended together, how hospital orders and out-patient prescriptions are fulfilled and how recipients are prioritized. These decision-making processes will be formulated as large-scale multistage stochastic programs and will be calibrated using data from multiple sources. The blending decisions will be modeled as a multistage stochastic mixed-integer program, a class of problems that has a well-deserved reputation for being very difficult to solve, but exhibit appealing structure. Patient prioritization decisions will be modeled as a multistage stochastic convex program and an ambitious combination of these decision processes will be modeled as a multistage stochastic mixed-integer convex program. Overall, the main intellectual merits of the work lie in the timeliness and novelty of the application (i.e., milk bank operations) as well as the modeling and algorithmic challenges that will be overcome in solving the models.