Heuristic Solutions for Locating Health Resources

This work is aimed at finding the best locations in which to place health resources for treating patients who have suffered a diabetic coma in the province of Burgos, Spain. The authors have modeled the problem of locating facilities in Burgos to minimize the number of patients who suffer permanent damage after going into a diabetic coma. To do so, they introduced two probabilities: that of a patient suffering a diabetic coma, and that of a patient in a coma having permanent damage. The authors adapted, implemented, and compared the algorithms based on three metaheuristic strategies: scatter search, tabu search, and variable neighborhood search.