Spatial Location-Allocation Optimization For Rural Hospitals

Rural hospitals provide medical service for the rural areas accounting for50.05％of thepopulation,and it is an important component of our health and medical system.The layout of the ruralhospitals according to the principles of administrative divisions currently,namely the establishment of ahealth center in a township.However,space analysis for the hospitals’ location,size,and the surroundingresidental population shows that:the distribution of medical resources in the existence of a balancedsituation and the poor accessibility of the parts of space.In view of this,this article develops theoptimization methods of geographical configuration based on GIS from the space facilities optimizationangle,and try planning and adjustment of the spatial layout of the rual hospitals.The main research contentsinclude:the existing condition analysis of spatial layout for rural hospitals,the design of ArcGIS layoutoptimization tool and the spatial layout optimization case studies for rural hospitals.The overall ideas are as follows:(1)The establishment for medical health geographic database of thestudy area include that the space distribution of hospital medical facilities,the space distribution ofresidential areas,and the transportation network dataset;(2)The assessment of hospital space distributioncharacteristics using spatial analysis,facilities accessibility model and the optimal resource allocationmodel;(3)The optimization for the spatial layout of rural hospitals using the location allocation models.Dueto the lack of the P value model tool of capacity constraints,this article use ArcGIS10software for theplatform,basing on the Geoprocessing framework,integrating the ArcGIS network analysis,the tool PuLP ofCoin-or Python linear programming modeling and linear programming software CPLEX,designing the toolfor the P value modeling and solver of capacity constraints in ArcGIS by the python language program.The case in this article is regarding to the space distribution of the medical resources in LankaoCounty,verifying the effectiveness of the space layout optimization methon based on location allocationmodel.Comprehensive consideration of the hospital position,number and size,as well as settlementsoutpatient demand,this article uses the location allocation tool in the ArcGIS10network analysis moduleand the space layout optimization tool of capacity constraints developed by this article to optimize themedical resources of the study area using the maximum coverage model tool and P value model tool,thencomparision and analysis the optimization results.The experimental results show that adjusting the number of hospitals,location or scale,can significantly improve the accessibility of medical services.Theoptimization tool developing in this article has very good practicability in the space layout optimizationproblems,and can satisfy the needs of the medical space layout planning.