Optimizing the facility location design of organ transplant centers

This paper presents a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) long-term decision model to optimize the location of organ transplant centers. The objective is to minimize the sum of the weighted time components between the moment a donor organ becomes available and its transplantation into the recipient's body. The weight factor for the elapsed time before the organ's removal from the donor body allows to assign a lower weight to this time component in the objective function in order to reflect the criticality of the process after the organ's removal. The specificity of organ transplants makes the model more complex than a traditional facility location model. The model is applied to the Belgian organ transplant path. Extensive numerical experiments reveal the key factors that impact the long-term decision of centralizing versus decentralizing transplant centers. (c) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.