An integrated approach based on two-objective optimization and 2SFCA model for health-care facility location-allocation problems

Abstract

Public health-care facilities are essential to all communities, and their location has long been an important issue in urban planning. With the steady growth of Shenzhen's population, the government needs to decide where health-care facilities should be located to improve the equity of accessibility, and further more to raise the residential needs and satisfaction for the entire population. As a large immigrate city, Shenzhen is a complex socio-ecological system which make it hard to find the best solution that meets all of the objectives. In this article, we establish a multi-objective model to examine the problem of where health-care facilities should be located to improve accessibility for the entire population and decrease the cost of building new facilities. In particular, the model accounts for the different requirements of varying age groups. We used data from Shenzhen and two heuristic algorithms to create the model. The strategy proposed here can be adopted in urban planning and help policymakers reach better decisions.