Abstract
The Syrian crisis began on 15 March 2011. It is one of the bloodiest and complicated conflicts in the world today. Although almost eight years have passed over this tragedy, civilians continue to suffer from conflicts and destructions in the area. As a result, this situation disregards human life and the number of people in need increases day by day. Particularly, people who have to live in the conflict area encounter troubles with regard to health, shelter, food and other needs. Thus, we have focused on identifying the Primary Health Care Center (PHCC) locations within Idleb Governorate in Syria. Data is extracted from a sample containing 23 sub-districts in the governorate and a total of 338 communities. We have formulated a mixed integer-weighted goal programming model and combined it with a Geographic Information System-GIS (ArcMap). The model is solved via an optimization package and moreover, sensitivity analyses are conducted to achieve a more in-depth study. Our aim was to have 60 PHCCs out of 77 available candidate PHCCs and the model located 42 PHCCs in total, by allocating 379,080 people, with a total cost of USD 1,000,353 and a cash for work amounting to USD 163,549. Accordingly, the model’s outputs and sensitivity analyses are expected to help decision-makers in case of such disasters.
Highlights
Disasters may occur anywhere in the world and may be categorized as natural or man-made disasters
We have focused on maximizing the number of located Primary Health Care Center (PHCC) with health availability factors and the cash for work amount of the located PHCCs simultaneously, differently from what was previously studied in the literature
103% for the objectives of PHCCs with internet service and PHCCs with vaccination, respectively. These mean that the number of located PHCCs with these availability factors is higher than the targeted values
Summary
Disasters may occur anywhere in the world and may be categorized as natural or man-made disasters. While a natural disaster emerges from natural hazards on earth (such as floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, tsunamis, etc.); man-made disasters are caused by human behaviors. Some of these include, among others, industrial, transport or public health accidents, terrorism, crimes against humanity and warfare. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates that there are approximately 68.5 million people who are subjected to forced displacement at global level worldwide and have been forced to leave their homes because of battles and armed conflicts [2]. Of these 68.5 million people, about 40 million are internally displaced
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