Heuristics for locating two types of public health-care facilities

Abstract

We consider a public health-care facility location problem in which there are two types of public health-care facilities: public hospitals and health centers. A public hospital provides both hospital services and homecare services, while a health center provides only homecare service. We focus on the problem of determining locations of public hospitals and health centers and allocating patients to the facilities with the objective of minimizing total construction cost for the public health-care facilities. We present an integer programming formulation for the problem, and develop two types of heuristics, based on priority rules and an approximate mathematical formulation. Results of a series of computational experiments on a number of problem instances show that the algorithms give good solutions in a reasonable computation time.