CITRUS: Cost and Ischemia Time Reduction using Urban Air Mobility Solutions for Organ Transport

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) involves the use of both piloted and autonomous aerial vehicles, ranging from small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), such as drones, to larger passenger-carrying personal air vehicles (PAVs). This ground-breaking approach holds the potential to transform healthcare logistics by facilitating the fast and efficient transportation of organs between hospitals, addressing critical mobility challenges in healthcare delivery. However, scheduling organ transport is fraught with challenges, including (1) the limited availability of UAM vehicles at specific hospital branches, (2) the critical Cold Ischemia Time (CIT) for various organs, and (3) the high flying costs associated with moving organs from source to destination. This paper proposes a heuristic solution that simultaneously tackles these challenges and provides an approximate solution in polynomial time. To evaluate the performance of our algorithm, we compare it against a baseline, which prioritizes cost efficiency. Experimental evaluation of CITRUS demonstrates notable performance improvements over the baseline, with an average increase of 3% in delivery success rates.