  In this paper, a real-world transportation problem is addressed, concerning
the collection and the transportation of biological sample tubes from sampling
points to a main hospital. Blood and other biological samples are collected in
different centers during morning hours. Then, the samples are transported to
the main hospital, for their analysis, by a fleet of vehicles located in
geographically distributed depots. Each sample has a limited lifetime and must
arrive to the main hospital within that time. If a sample cannot arrive to the
hospital within the lifetime, either is discarded or must be processed in
dedicated facilities called Spoke Centers.Two Mixed Integer Linear Programming
formulations and an Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search (ALNS) metaheuristic
algorithm have been developed for the problem. Computational experiments on
different sets of instances based on real-life data provided by the Local
Healthcare Authority of Bologna, Italy, are presented. A comparison on small
instances with the optimal solutions obtained by the formulations shows the
effectiveness of the proposed ALNS algorithm. On real-life instances, different
batching policies of the samples are evaluated. The results show that the ALNS
algorithm is able to find solutions in which all the samples are delivered on
time, while in the real case about the 40% [5] of the samples is delivered
late.
