IE $3311/5318$ Project Description

For the semester project, students are asked to form teams of at most three members. $($I strongly recommend teams with $3$ students and might merge smaller teams together.$)$ Remember that this project constitutes $20\%$ of your final grade, so pick your teams wisely! Please make sure to submit your Team Selection Form and Final Report by September ${23}^{rd}$ and December $4^{th},$ respectively.

Here is a preliminary project description:

Suppose you are an Operations Researcher at the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network $($OPTN$).$ You have been hired as a Kidney Paired Donation $($KPD$)$ consultant for the KPD Pilot Program to help with the live donation process in the United States. Given a data set, your task is to develop a KPD plan to maximize the number of compatible transplantations. KPD seeks to match one patient and their incompatible donor with another patient and donor in the same situation for kidney exchange.

For example, Jennifer wants to donate her kidney to her brother, John. Sam wants to donate his kidney to his colleague, Brandon. Unfortunately, Jennifer cannot donate to John because she is blood type $A,$ and John is blood type B$.$ Sam cannot donate to Brandon because he is blood type B$,$ and Brandon is blood type A$.$ Fortunately, Jennifer is a match for Brandon, and Sam is a match for John. See the following figure for an illustration.

In this project, you will have access to a data set with incompatible pairs, and you will be asked to use Operations Research tools and techniques to find optimal matchings of sizes two and three. Additionally, the objectives and constraints that you are seeking in a KDP plan, as well as the process that you follow to produce your plan$($s$),$ must be completely transparent. For example, you must share all input data, code, and results files. They must also be well$-$documented. You must also provide a written report about the process that you followed, the KPD plans that you are proposing, and justification for why they should be chosen.