Capacitated Location and Allocation Models of Long-Term Care Facilities

Abstract

People are living longer than ever before. As a result, life expectancy is going up and the demand of long-term care facilities is increasing in most countries. The facilities provide rehabilitative, restorative, and skilled nursing care to patients or residents in need of assistance with activities of daily living. This study deals with the capacitated location and allocation problem of long-term care facilities in a city that consists of a finite number of regions. Assuming that in each region candidate locations for three types of facilities are already given, two integer programming models are developed under the closest assignment rule reflecting the demand characteristics of the facilities. Both the location and type of the facilities to be built become decision variables. To show the validity of the models, numerical prob-lems are solved with commercial software, CPLEX. Also, sensitivity studies were conducted to identify relationships between the system parameters.