Survey Lecture: Christina Büsing: Robust Strategic Planning for Mobile Medical Units

Thursday, April 27, 2023, 12:30pm

Location: Computer Science Center, Building E2, ground floor, B-IT room 5053.2.

Speaker: Christina Büsing

 

Abstract: 

Mobile medical units (MMUs) allow for an efficient medical coverage of sparsely populated, spacious areas. Unfortunately, flexibility comes at the price of a highly complex operation planning process. In this talk, we investigate the strategic planning of an MMU service by deciding where MMU operation sites should be set up and how often these should be serviced. To that end, we study the strategic planning problem for MMUs (SPMMU) – a capacitated set covering problem that includes existing practices and two types of patient demands: (i) steerable demands representing patients who seek health services through a centralized appointment system and can be steered to any treatment facility within a given consideration set and (ii) unsteerable demands representing walk-in patients who always visit the closest available treatment facility.

We propose an integer linear program for the SPMMU that can be solved via Benders decomposition and constraint generation. All our results transfer to the session-specific SPMMU and we evaluate our models in a computational study based on a set of instances generated from a rural primary care system in Germany.