Location, allocation and routing of temporary health centers in rural areas in crisis, solved by improved harmony search algorithm

Abstract

In this paper, an uncertain integrated model for simultaneously locating temporary health centers in the affected areas, allocating affected areas to these centers, and routing to transport their required good is considered. Health centers can be settled in one of the affected areas or in a place out of them; therefore, the proposed model offers the best relief operation policy when it is possible to supply the goods of affected areas (which are customers of goods) directly or under coverage. Due to that the problem is NP-Hard, to solve the problem in large-scale, a meta-heuristic algorithm based on harmony search algorithm is presented and its performance has been compared with basic harmony search algorithm and neighborhood search algorithm in small and large scale test problems. The results show that the proposed harmony search algorithm has a suitable efficiency. © 2017, the Authors.