Modelos de localização e análise econômica de unidade de serviço de atendimento médico de urgência

This study shows how location models such as p-median, p-center, and a proposed variation were employed to improve urgent and emergency care provided through the emergency mobile health units (SAMU). Besides incurring unnecessary additional operational costs, it is important to note that the failure or inefficiency of these mobile units can result in loss of human lives. The SAMU system in question serves a city with a population of approximately 213,576 inhabitants and it handles more than 1,400 calls per year. Operations research techniques like mixed integer linear programming and facility location principles were used to assertively and quantitatively define the best locations for SAMU units. The location problems were solved using the Julia 1.5.0 programming language, and other softwares were also used for organizing the data. The Lagrangian relaxation proved to be an efficient method to solve the problems which are considered NP-hard. Under the different scenarios tested, it was concluded that when compared with the p-median model, the p-center method found the best locations for the emergency mobile health units as it reduced the maximum distance between patient and the mobile units, in addition to other analyses.