A Mathematical Model for Locating the Medical and Emergency Centers considering the Failure Probability of Centers

Abstract

Enhancing the amount of industrial and chemical production is one of the most important effects of increasing rural people’s migration to cities, which leads to many abnormalities in the healthcare domain. In this regard, one of the most important tasks of health sector managers is designing and implementing some programs to monitor and control the level of community health, which is one of the health organizations’ strategic planning. On the other hand, the location of service centers is one of the most important problems in the area of strategic planning by any organization because selecting an appropriate site for constructing facilities can have a significant effect on reducing costs and increasing the coverage level. However, an appropriate site to construct the facilities must also have maximum reliability in addition to reducing costs and increasing the coverage level. This problem is important because many factors, such as natural disasters, result in failure of centers and influence the confidence level of system performance. Therefore, it is necessary to consider maximizing reliability in locating centers. For this purpose, an integer mathematical model is presented in this paper to select the optimum site for constructing the medical and emergency centers by considering the failure probability of each center. The research model’s objective function minimizes the system costs, including the costs of construction, patient transfer, and failure of medical and emergency centers. Finally, a numerical example is designed and reviewed by real-world problems to ensure the performance accuracy of the proposed model.