A comprehensive mathematical model for designing an organ transplant supply chain network under uncertainty

Abstract

One of the most important issues in area of health and hygiene is location-allocation of organ harvesting centers and transplant centers according to coordination between supply and demand. In this paper, a mathematical model is presented for location-allocation of organ harvesting centers and transplant centers. The proposed model does not only minimize the present value of the total system costs, but also minimizes the geographical inequalities. The presented model is a bi-objective nonlinear mathematical programming and some of the problem parameters, such as cost, transport time and the like are associated with uncertainty and considered as fuzzy sets in the mathematical formulation. In this paper, an Organ Transplant Supply Chain (OTSC) has been designed and the ε-constraint method has been used to solve the problem and Iran is considered as a case study. The results show that the patient's family satisfaction rate is more important than the viability rate in the number of transplant operations performed and for a transplant operation to be performed, the minimum satisfaction rate () should be 0.4 and organ viability rate () should be 0.2.