Accessible, stable, and equitable health service network redesign: A robust mixed possibilistic-flexible approach

This paper addresses a multi-period three-level health service network redesign problem. The problem involves strategic decisions on locating, closing or expanding the capacity of network's facilities over the planning horizon, (re)designing an efficient referral system and (re)allocating patient zones to facilities while aiming at achieving an accessible, stable, and equitable network. A robust mixed possibilistic-flexible programming approach is devised to cope with imprecise parameters and soft constraints. Afterwards an improved augmented ε-constraint method is proposed to find the Pareto front. Finally, a real case study is provided to illustrate the performance of the proposed model and its solution procedure.