IP solutions for international kidney exchange programmes

Abstract

In kidney exchange programmes patients with end-stage renal failure may exchange their willing, but incompatible living donors among each other. National kidney exchange programmes are in operation in ten European countries, and some of them have already conducted international exchanges through regulated collaborations. The exchanges are selected by conducting regular matching runs (typically every three months) according to well-defined constraints and optimisation criteria, which may differ across countries. In this work we give integer programming formulations for solving international kidney exchange problems, where the optimisation goals and constraints may be different in the participating countries and various feasibility criteria may apply for the international cycles and chains. We also conduct simulations showing the long-run effects of international collaborations for different pools and under various national restrictions and objectives. We compute the expected gains of the cooperation between two countries with different pool sizes and different restrictions on the cycle-length. For instance, if country A allows 3-way cycles and country B allows 2-way cycles only, whilst the pool size of country A is four times larger than the pool size of country B (which is a realistic case for the relation of Spain and France, respectively), then the increase in the number of transplants will be about 2% for country A and about 37% for country B.

Analysis of multi-registry kidney exchange program with individual rationality constraints

“…The Czech Republic and Austria share their full registry data and allow algorithms to find solutions across registries. In Spain-Italy-Portugal collaboration, countries find their internal matches first and share the remaining data with other countries [14]. US also started multi-hospital exchange programs in 2008 [27].…”

“…There are multiple challenges in multi-registry/international exchange programs (mKEP) like data among registries, different bounds on cycle lengths, and simultaneous or non-simultaneous execution of transplants [14]. It has been shown that there could be cases where individual registries have incentives not to share full data to mKEP, which restrict registries from forming a coalition naturally.…”

Models and Algorithms for Social Distancing in Order to Stop the Spread of COVID-19

“…One of the main applications of operations research was healthcare, e.g. [21,12,30,24,4,18]. However, most of the papers in the operations research field are concerned with either simulation frameworks [27,23,16] or resource allocation problems [22,17,13,3].…”

Kidney Exchange: An Operations Perspective

“…70 The combined pool between the three countries included 113 pairs and resulted in one 3-way cycle https://www.lamoncloa.gob .es/lang/en/gobierno/news/Paginas/2018/20180808transplant.aspx. 71 See Biró et al (2019c) and Mincu et al (2020) for more forms of collaborations in European countries. 72 Of course, some transactions may have negative externalities that directly harm third parties, and it is easy to understand the objections of those who are harmed.…”