Blood products are essential components of any healthcare system, and their safety, in terms of being free of transfusion-transmittable infections, is crucial. While the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the United States requires all blood donations to be tested for a set of infections, it does not dictate which particular tests should be used by blood collection centers. Multiple FDA-licensed blood screening tests are available for each infection, but all screening tests are imperfectly reliable and have different costs. In addition, infection prevalence rates and several donor characteristics are uncertain, while surveillance methods are highly resource- and time-intensive. Therefore, only limited information is available to budget-constrained blood collection centers that need to devise a post-donation blood screening scheme so as to minimize the risk of an infectious donation being released into the blood supply. Our focus is on "robust" screening schemes under limited information. Toward this goal, we consider various objectives, and characterize structural properties of the optimal solutions under each objective. This allows us to gain insight and to develop efficient algorithms. Our research shows that using the proposed optimization-based approaches provides robust solutions with significantly lower expected infection risk compared to other testing schemes that satisfy the FDA requirements. Our findings have important public policy implications. / Ph. D.

This dissertation was to study computational theory and methods for ?nding multiple saddle critical points in Banach spaces. Two local minimax methods were developed for this purpose. One was for unconstrained cases and the other was for constrained cases. First, two local minmax characterization of saddle critical points in Banach spaces were established. Based on these two local minmax characterizations, two local minimax algorithms were designed. Their ?ow charts were presented. Then convergence analysis of the algorithms were carried out. Under certain assumptions, a subsequence convergence and a point-to-set convergence were obtained. Furthermore, a relation between the convergence rates of the functional value sequence and corresponding gradient sequence was derived. Techniques to implement the algorithms were discussed. In numerical experiments, those techniques have been successfully implemented to solve for multiple solutions of several quasilinear elliptic boundary value problems and multiple eigenpairs of the well known nonlinear p-Laplacian operator. Numerical solutions were presented by their pro?les for visualization. Several interesting phenomena of the solutions of quasilinear elliptic boundary value problems and the eigenpairs of the p-Laplacian operator have been observed and are open for further investigation. As a generalization of the above results, nonsmooth critical points were considered for locally Lipschitz continuous functionals. A local minmax characterization of nonsmooth saddle critical points was also established. To establish its version in Banach spaces, a new notion, pseudo-generalized-gradient has to be introduced. Based on the characterization, a local minimax algorithm for ?nding multiple nonsmooth saddle critical points was proposed for further study.

This dissertation was to study computational theory and methods for ?nding multiple saddle critical points in Banach spaces. Two local minimax methods were developed for this purpose. One was for unconstrained cases and the other was for constrained cases. First, two local minmax characterization of saddle critical points in Banach spaces were established. Based on these two local minmax characterizations, two local minimax algorithms were designed. Their ?ow charts were presented. Then convergence analysis of the algorithms were carried out. Under certain assumptions, a subsequence convergence and a point-to-set convergence were obtained. Furthermore, a relation between the convergence rates of the functional value sequence and corresponding gradient sequence was derived. Techniques to implement the algorithms were discussed. In numerical experiments, those techniques have been successfully implemented to solve for multiple solutions of several quasilinear elliptic boundary value problems and multiple eigenpairs of the well known nonlinear p-Laplacian operator. Numerical solutions were presented by their pro?les for visualization. Several interesting phenomena of the solutions of quasilinear elliptic boundary value problems and the eigenpairs of the p-Laplacian operator have been observed and are open for further investigation. As a generalization of the above results, nonsmooth critical points were considered for locally Lipschitz continuous functionals. A local minmax characterization of nonsmooth saddle critical points was also established. To establish its version in Banach spaces, a new notion, pseudo-generalized-gradient has to be introduced. Based on the characterization, a local minimax algorithm for ?nding multiple nonsmooth saddle critical points was proposed for further study.