Locating Selection and Resource Allocation After a Possible Earthquake in Amol City

Background and objective:

 Transferring injured people to medical centers is one of the important challenges of providing relief in natural and man-made disasters. Often, due to the damage caused by the disaster, it is not possible to transfer the injured to safe medical centers in the short term. Establishing field hospitals in suitable places is one of the common solutions in these situations. This study aims address the problem of location selection for field hospitals using mathematical modeling and asses how to allocate resources, including medical staff and needed medications by the temporary hospitals.

Method :

This study presents an integer programming model for the location selection problem. To evaluate the proposed model, the real data from Amol City was collected and used as inputs. The optimal solution was determined using GAMS 25.1 optimization software.

Results:

 The calculation results illustrated the best place for the establishment of field hospitals, which is located in Banafsheh Park. It has also been determined that each deployed field hospital should have 60 beds. In addition, the optimal number of medical personnel and relief vehicles for relief operations was determined. The sensitivity analysis has also shown that if any of the hospitals located in Amol is damaged and inactive due to an accident, Hefdeh Shahrivar Square is a suitable place to build a field hospital. 

Conclusion:

 The results of this study can help authorities in Amol city to make the best decisions regarding where to establish field hospitals and how to use the limited available resources during disasters. The main innovation of the presented model also is the location of field hospitals along with considering the active hospitals around the affected areas so that the injured can be transferred to the active hospitals in addition to the constructed field hospitals. In this model, a constraint has been applied to complete the service time, so that the rescue vehicles have a limited time to transport the injured to the rescue centers.