Multicriteria tour planning for mobile healthcare facilities in a developing country

A multiobjective combinatorial optimization (MOCO) formulation for the following location-routing problem in healthcare management is given: For a mobile healthcare facility, a closed tour with stops selected from a given set of population nodes has to be found. Tours are evaluated according to three criteria: (i) An economic efficiency criterion related to the tour length, (ii) the criterion of average distances to the nearest tour stops corresponding to p-median location problem formulations, and (iii) a coverage criterion measuring the percentage of the population unable to reach a tour stop within a predefined maximum distance. Three algorithms to compute approximations to the set of Pareto-efficient solutions of the described MOCO problem are developed. The first uses the P-ACO technique, and the second and the third use the VEGA and the MOGA variant of multiobjective genetic algorithms, respectively. Computational experiments for the Thies region in Senegal were carried out to evaluate the three approaches on real-world problem instances. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.