A Stochastic Optimization Approach to a Location-Allocation Problem of Organ Transplant Centers

Decision-making concerning the location of critical resource on the geographical network is important in many industries. In the healthcare system, these decisions include location of emergency and preventive care. The decisions of location play a crucial role due to determining the travel time between supply and demand points and response time in emergencies. Organs are considered as highly perishable products, whose variety of each product has a specific perish time. Despite the importance of this field, only a small proportion of healthcare sector is dedicated to this field. Matching and finding the best recipient for a donated organ is one of the major problems in this field, which is also crucial for the overall organ transplantation process. Balancing the demand and supply in a transplant organ supply chain in order to decrease the waiting list needs certain scheduling and management. The main contribution of this paper consists of considering recipient regions as another component of the supply chain; inaddition, importance of transportation time and waiting lists has led us to consider a bi-objective model. In addition, uncertainty of input data has led us to consider a stochastic approach.