Optimizing the Transport of Organs for Transplantation

As an organ becomes available for transplantation, a recipient must be selected. Usually, donor and recipient are geographically apart. Therefore, the transport of the organ must be planned and executed within the time window imposed by the maximum preservation time of the organ, which can impact recipient selection. The Cold Ischemia Time - CIT, that is the time elapsed between the surgical removal of the organ and its transplantation, must be the minimum possible to improve the transplantation success. In this sense, the air transport becomes the best option and, sometimes, it is the only way to deliver the organ before perishing. The planning of an organ transportation means choosing, among thousands of possible sequences of flights, the option that delivers the organ faster to its destination. This problem can be modeled as a resource constrained shortest path. Given the urgency and importance of this task, which is solved manually in Brazil, we present a labeling algorithm to find the optimal sequence of flights. Computational tests performed on 25 Brazilian real cases showed a reduction, on average, of 37,46% for the CITs and 44,17% for the transport times.