Reformulation-Linearization Technique Approach for Kidney Exchange Program IT Healthcare Platforms

Abstract

Kidney exchange allows a potential living donor whose kidney is incompatible with his intended recipient to donate a kidney to another patient so that the donor's intended recipient can receive a compatible kidney from another donor. These exchanges can include cycles of longer than two donor-patient pairs and chains produced by altruistic donors. Kidney exchange programs (KEPs) can be modeled as a maximum-weight cycle-packing problem in a directed graph. This paper develops a new integer programming model for KEPs by applying the reformulation-linearization technique (RLT) to enhance a lower bound obtained by its linear programming (LP) relaxation. Given the results obtained from the proposed model, the model is expected to be utilized in the integrated KEP IT (Information Technology) healthcare platform to obtain plans for optimized kidney exchanges.