While the concept of regional organization (regionalization) of perinatal care aimed at reducing perinatal mortality has remained at the agenda of developed countries since 1970&rsquo / s, Turkey is one of the countries that does not have such a system yet. In this study, a three-level hierarchical location-allocation model is developed for the regionalization of perinatal care in an attempt to have a better distribution of maternal and perinatal health care services in Turkey. Since the mathematical model developed is difficult to solve in a reasonable time, we propose three heuristic approaches: top-down, modified top-down and Lagrangean relaxation based heuristics. These heuristics are computationally tested on a set of problem instances for networks ranging from 10 to 737 vertices. A significant result is that Lagrangean relaxation based heuristic outperforms the other two heuristics in terms of solution quality. In most of the test problems, the modified top-down heuristic outperforms the top-down heuristic in terms of solution quality. Using the proposed approaches, we solve a real life problem corresponding to the Eastern and South Eastern Anatolian Regions (the East Region) of Turkey.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:METU/oai:etd.lib.metu.edu.tr:http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/3/12609367/index.pdf |
| Date | 01 February 2008 |
| Creators | Karakaya, Sakir |
| Contributors | Meral, Sedef |
| Publisher | METU |
| Source Sets | Middle East Technical Univ. |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | M.S. Thesis |
| Format | text/pdf |
| Rights | To liberate the content for public access |
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