Organ Transplantation Regions: The Need for Optimization

Since the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984, the number of people receiving organs each year has increased [1]. Unfortunately, the number of donations has not kept up with the number of patients needing them, resulting in a severe shortage of organs [1]. This requires that we allocate organs as efficiently as possible. Currently in the U.S., organs are allocated at a local, regional, and national level in that order depending on patient-organ matches. In this paper, we consider the effect of region design on total intra-regional liver transplants and formulate it as a setpartitioning problem.