Modeling the budget-constrained dynamic uncapacitated facility location–network design problem and solving it via two efficient heuristics: A case study of health care

Abstract

a b s t r a c tThis paper presents a model for the budget-constrained dynamic (multi-period) uncapacitated facility location-network design problem (DUFLNDP). This problem is concerned with the determination of the optimal locations of facilities and the design of the underlying network simultaneously in which there is a budget constraint on investment for opening the facilities and constructing (activating) links for each time period during the planning horizon. The objective is to minimize the total travel costs for customers and operating costs for facilities and network links. Furthermore, a greedy heuristic and a fixand-optimize heuristic based on simulated annealing and exact methods (Branch & Bound and cutting methods) are proposed to solve the model. The performance of the proposed algorithms were tested on extensive randomly generated instances and compared with the CPLEX solver. The budget-constrained DU FLNDP has a lot of important applications which as one of them, the accessibility of health care facilities in Illam Province of Iran is investigated.

Cold chain configuration design: location-allocation decision-making using coordination, value deterioration, and big data approximation

“…Inventory costs at distribution centers and economies of scale associated with transportation cost are expected to help in solving the facility location problem (Daskin et al, 2002). Ghaderi and Jabalameli (2013) provided a solution for the longitudinal uncapacitated facility location-network design problem with budget constraints for opening the facility and creating links during each period of planning horizon and demonstrated the practical feasibility of the proposed approach by applying it to health care facilities in Iran.…”

“…Few studies (e.g., Ghaderi and Jabalameli, 2013) have used period data to investigate location-allocation problems under different environments, thereby complicating the use of such data in cold chain configuration with a longitudinal product characteristic (shelf life). The use of a seed or potential locations as input parameters in the model is expected to not only lead to more practical results by avoiding the possible selection of forbidden locations (Drexl and Schneider, 2015) but also to simplify the modeling of such problems.…”

An integrated approach for planning a long-term care network with uncertainty, strategic policy and equity considerations

“…Multi-period approaches have also been rarely used for strategic and tactical health care planning, and, to our knowledge, only Santibáñez et al (2009), Ghaderi and Jabalameli (2013) and Mestre et al (2015) have developed research in this area. Accounting for the impact of strategic health policy options on planning decisions is also recognized as relevant, but very few studies have explicitly dealt with this issue (for example, Maenhout & Vanhoucke (2013)).…”

A queuing location–allocation model for a capacitated health care system

“…Guerriero et al [13] studied the problem of location and reorganized the Calabrian health care network. Ghaderi et al [14] presented a model that is concerned with the determination of the optimal locations of incapacitated health care systems. Vatsa et al [15] studied a multi-period problem of allocating doctors to primary health centers.…”