Developing and verifying an artificial twin of the organ procurement and transplant process: A systems approach

ABSTRACT

The practice of deceased-donor solid-organ transplantation is unique among clinical therapies because it substantially benefits recipients, The allocation process is a complex System-of-Systems (SoS) with multiple stakeholders, components, rules, and policies. While we model and simulate such SoS, they are challenging to verify and validate thoroughly due to a large number of use cases and the sensitivity to initial conditions. Furthermore, subject matter experts within communities of practice do not trust such models because they are difficult to explain. This paper proposes a trust-centric approach to validation focusing on experimentally exploring the simulation’s behavior space and demonstrating its utility to a community of experts. We describe a three-step validation process to show how modelling and simulation professionals can foster trust in simulations of a complex SoS. We apply the framework to verify and validate a simulation model of the Kidney–Pancreas (KP) allocation process within the United States.

KEYWORDS:

• Agent-based simulation
• organ transplant
• organ allocation
• verification and validation
• hybrid modelling
• complex system of systems

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).