COOL-MC: Verifying and Explaining RL Policies for Platelet Inventory Management

TL;DR

This paper applies COOL-MC to verify and explain a reinforcement learning policy for platelet inventory management, ensuring safety and transparency in a critical healthcare supply chain context.

Contribution

It introduces the first formal verification and explanation of an RL-based platelet inventory policy using probabilistic model checking and feature analysis.

Findings

Policy achieves 2.9% stockout probability within 200 steps

Policy mainly considers inventory age over other features

Diverse replenishment strategies are employed by the policy

Abstract

Platelets expire within five days. Blood banks face uncertain daily demand and must balance ordering decisions between costly wastage from overstocking and life-threatening shortages from understocking. Reinforcement learning (RL) can learn effective ordering policies for this Markov decision process (MDP), but the resulting neural policies remain black boxes, hindering trust and adoption in safety-critical domains. We apply COOL-MC, a tool that combines RL with probabilistic model checking and explainable RL, to verify and explain a trained policy for the MDP on platelet inventory management inspired by Haijema et al. By constructing a policy-induced discrete-time Markov chain (which includes only the reachable states under the trained policy to reduce memory usage), we verify PCTL properties and provide feature-level explanations. Results show that the trained policy achieves a 2.9% stockout probability and a 1.1% inventory-full (potential wastage) probability within a 200-step horizon, primarily attends to the age distribution of inventory rather than other features such as day of week or pending orders. Action reachability analysis reveals that the policy employs a diverse replenishment strategy, with most order quantities reached quickly, while several are never selected. Counterfactual analysis shows that replacing medium-large orders with smaller ones leaves both safety probabilities nearly unchanged, indicating that these orders are placed in well-buffered inventory states. This first formal verification and explanation of an RL platelet inventory management policy demonstrates COOL-MC's value for transparent, auditable decision-making in safety-critical healthcare supply chain domains.