Development a Heuristic Method to Locate and Allocate the Medical Centers to Minimize the Earthquake Relief Operation Time

BACKGROUND: Location-allocation is a combinatorial optimization problem, and is defined as Non deterministic Polynomial Hard (NP) hard optimization. Therefore, solution of such a problem should be shifted from exact to heuristic or Meta heuristic due to the complexity of the problem. Locating medical centers and allocating injuries of an earthquake to them has high importance in earthquake disaster management so that developing a proper method will reduce the time of relief operation and will consequently decrease the number of fatalities. METHODS: This paper presents the development of a heuristic method based on two nested genetic algorithms to optimize this location allocation problem by using the abilities of Geographic Information System (GIS). In the proposed method, outer genetic algorithm is applied to the location part of the problem and inner genetic algorithm is used to optimize the resource allocation. RESULTS: The final outcome of implemented method includes the spatial location of new required medical centers. The method also calculates that how many of the injuries at each demanding point should be taken to any of the existing and new medical centers as well. CONCLUSIONS: The results of proposed method showed high performance of designed structure to solve a capacitated location-allocation problem that may arise in a disaster situation when injured people has to be taken to medical centers in a reasonable time.