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Hybrid metaheuristic method for determining locations for long-term health care facilities

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Abstract

Long-term health care facilities have gained an important role in today’s health care environments, due to the global trend of aging of human population. This paper considers the problem of network design in health-care systems, named the Long-Term Care Facility Location Problem (LTCFLP), which deals with determining locations for long-term care facilities among given potential sites. The objective is to minimize the maximal number of patients assigned to established facilities. We have developed an efficient hybrid method, based on combining the Evolutionary Approach (EA) with modified Variable Neighborhood Search method (VNS). The EA method is used in order to obtain a better initial solution that will enable the VNS to solve the LTCFLP more efficiently. The proposed hybrid algorithm is additionally enhanced by an exchange local search procedure. The algorithm is benchmarked on a data set from the literature with up to 80 potential candidate sites and on large-scale instances with up to 400 nodes. Presented computational results show that the proposed hybrid method quickly reaches all optimal solutions from the literature and in most cases outperforms existing heuristic methods for solving this problem.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Mathematics, University of Belgrade, Studentski trg 16/IV, 11000, Belgrade, Serbia

    Miroslav Marić & Zorica Stanimirović

  2. MFC-Mikrokomerc, Zaplanjska 86, 11000, Belgrade, Serbia

    Srdjan Božović

Authors
  1. Miroslav Marić
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  2. Zorica Stanimirović
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  3. Srdjan Božović
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Zorica Stanimirović.

Additional information

This research was supported by Serbian Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development under the grants no. 174010 and 47017.

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Marić, M., Stanimirović, Z. & Božović, S. Hybrid metaheuristic method for determining locations for long-term health care facilities. Ann Oper Res 227, 3–23 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-013-1313-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-013-1313-8

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