Optimizing the facility location design of organ transplant centers

Abstract

a b s t r a c t a r t i c l e i n f o Available online xxxx Keywords:Facility location Organ transplant Long-term planning Mixed integer linear programming 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.

Multi-objective design of an organ transplant network under uncertainty

“…Clinical data were used for solving numerical examples. Beliën et al (2012) proposed a mixed-integer linear programming model with deterministic parameters to define the optimal location of transplant centers. Their objective function minimizes the total weighted time, by assigning a weight coefficient to the time period when a removed organ should be implanted to the patient body and the time required for the round-trip traveling of a unit from a donor hospital to donor transplant centers.…”

“…Organ transplantation, which is one of the most vital subset of healthcare systems, has become a successful treatment for many diseases that otherwise would have been fatal (Beliën et al, 2012). Despite all the advances and sophisticated technologies in operations and transportation methods in healthcare facilities, management on location-allocation of organ transplant centers in some districts has remained far from being cost and time efficient on a consistent basis.…”

Facility Location of Organ Procurement Organisations in Indian Health Care Supply Chain Management

“…Belien, Boeck, Colpaert, Devesse and Bossche [38] presented a mixed integer linear programming model to optimise the location of the organ transplant centres to minimise the sum of time components involved from procuring the organ from the donor until the organ is transplanted to the recipient multiplied by certain weights. Recently, in a similar context, Zahiri, Tavakkoli-Moghaddam, Mohammadi and Jula [39] also developed a bi-objective model with the addition of including the waiting time in the queue for the transplantation procedure while keeping uncertainty in mind.…”

The Effect of Environmental Criteria on Locating a Biorefinery: A Green Facility Location Problem

“…Such is the case of health care problems, in which health care centers (typically hospitals, as pointed out by Chatterjee and Mukherjee, 2013) should be located in order to maximize the assistance or coverage level. For instance, Beliën et al (2013) optimally placed some organ transplant centers. Few papers have considered biorefinery location from an analytical viewpoint.…”