Fairness in Kidney Exchange Programs through Optimal Solutions Enumeration

Not all patients who need kidney transplant can find a donor with compatible characteristics. Kidney exchange programs (KEPs) seek to match such incompatible patient-donor pairs together, usually with the objective of maximizing the total number of transplants. We propose a randomized policy for selecting an optimal solution in which patients’ equity of opportunity to receive a transplant is promoted. Our approach gives rise to the problem of enumerating all optimal solutions, which we tackle using a hybrid of constraint programming and linear programming. We empirically demonstrate the advantages of our proposed method over the common practice of using the first optimal solution obtained by a solver.