Ant Lion Optimization algorithm for kidney exchanges

Abstract

The kidney exchange programs bring new insights in the field of organ transplantation. They make the previously not allowed surgery of incompatible patient-donor pairs easier to be performed on a large scale. Mathematically, the kidney exchange is an optimization problem for the number of possible exchanges among the incompatible pairs in a given pool. Also, the optimization modeling should consider the expected quality-adjusted life of transplant candidates and the shortage of computational and operational hospital resources. In this article, we introduce a bio-inspired stochastic-based Ant Lion Optimization, ALO, algorithm to the kidney exchange space to maximize the number of feasible cycles and chains among the pool pairs. Ant Lion Optimizer-based program achieves comparable kidney exchange results to the deterministic-based approaches like integer programming. Also, ALO outperforms other stochastic-based methods such as Genetic Algorithm in terms of the efficient usage of computational resources and the quantity of resulting exchanges. Ant Lion Optimization algorithm can be adopted easily for on-line exchanges and the integration of weights for hard-to-match patients, which will improve the future decisions of kidney exchange programs. A reference implementation for ALO algorithm for kidney exchanges is written in MATLAB and is GPL licensed. It is available as free open-source software from: https://github.com/SaraEl-Metwally/ALO_algorithm_for_Kidney_Exchanges.

Binary Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm for Kidney Exchanges

“…We compared our method to Genetic Algorithm and ALO, which are the two known stochastic-based optimization algorithm practical to the kidney exchange space [1,3,4]. GA was applied to search for the maximum amount of feasible exchanges in the extracted chains and cycles.…”

“…GA was applied to search for the maximum amount of feasible exchanges in the extracted chains and cycles. Mutation and crossover probabilities for GA were set to 0.2 and 0.8 correspondingly; the used selection method was Roulette Wheel [4]. For easiness, this method is mentioned as GA-KPD.…”

“…Moreover, we compared our results with the Ant Lion optimization algorithm. We will call this method ALO-KPD (For more details, see [4]).…”

“…Ant Lion Optimization algorithm (ALO) methods reach good results regarding the number of resulting transplants compared to the best-known methods. However, ALO methods did not get a good running time like integer programming [4]. Kennedy and Eberhart [5] initially proposed the Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm for solving optimization problems.…”

Ant Lion Optimization: Variants, Hybrids, and Applications

“…In mathematics, kidney exchange can be considered as an optimization problem. Hamouda et al [185] used ALO in Kidney exchange space by trying to maximize feasible cycles and chains numbers.…”