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A Three-level Hierarchical Location-allocation Model For Regional Organization Of Perinatal Care

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.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:METU/oai:etd.lib.metu.edu.tr:http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/3/12609367/index.pdf
Date01 February 2008
CreatorsKarakaya, Sakir
ContributorsMeral, Sedef
PublisherMETU
Source SetsMiddle East Technical Univ.
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeM.S. Thesis
Formattext/pdf
RightsTo liberate the content for public access

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