A multi-objective optimization approach for health-care facility location-allocation problems in highly developed cities such as Hong Kong

Abstract

Public health-care facilities are essential to all communities, and their location/allocation has long been an important issue in urban planning. Given the steady growth of Hong Kong's population, new health-care facilities will need to be built over the next few years. This research examines the problem of where such health-care facilities should be located to improve the equity of accessibility, raise the total accessibility for the entire population, reduce the population that falls outside the coverage range, and decrease the cost of building new facilities. However, because urban areas such as Hong Kong are complex socio-ecological systems, the aforementioned conflicting objectives make it impossible to find one ‘best’ solution that meets all of the objectives. Therefore, this research uses a genetic algorithm based multi-objective optimization (MOO) approach to yield a set of Pareto solutions that can be used to find the most practical tradeoffs between the conflicting objectives. The MOO approach is used to optimize the location of new health-care facilities in Hong Kong for 2020. Because the MOO approach provides a set of diverse plans, planners can compare the value of each objective and the spatial distribution of facilities to analyze or select the solution that best supports their further decisions. Comparing the Pareto solutions with other solutions, it indicates that the MOO approach is a sensible choice for solving multi-objective problems of health-care facility location-allocation in Hong Kong.