Emergency medical center location problem with people evacuation solved by extended TODIM and objective programming

This study aims to decide the location of emergency medical centers and the evacuation of survivors after a disaster happened. An extended interactive multi-criteria decision making method (TODIM) with interval 2-tuple linguistic variables is proposed to evaluate the potential locations of the emergency medical centers. A bi-objective mixed-integer programming is then established to determine the final locations and the evacuation plan based on previous evaluations. A real case of an earthquake in Wenchuan, China in 2008 is analyzed to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.