A hierarchical model for the location of perinatal facilities in the municipality of Rio de Janeiro

We present a 3-level hierarchical model for the location of maternal and perinatal health care facilities in Rio de Janeiro. Relaxations and heuristics are developed for this model and computational results are given for problems available in the literature, for networks ranging from 10 to 400 vertices. The quality of the solutions produced by the procedures we developed do not differ significantly among themselves. The model is also applied to a case study corresponding to real 1995 data of the municipality, of Rio de Janeiro. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.