Designing the preventive healthcare networks within the framework of case studies in Iran

Attractiveness of facilities has a great role on the success ofpreventive healthcare facilities. In contrast to sick people,the public should sufficiently be motivated to participate inpreventive programs. Attractiveness can be modeled as afunction of distance and congestion delays in the facilities.In this paper, we study a preventive healthcare networkdesign problem within a framework of case studies in Iran,so as to maximize the participation of public in preventivehealthcare programs. The concept of utility of customers,defined as the surplus of the customers’ willingness to payover the travel distance and congestion delays, isconsidered in the constraint set. In the case studies, theneeded data is extracted from Geographical Informationsystem to find out the accurate distances among the nodesof the network.

Keywords:

Network Design Problem , Preventive Healthcare , Utility