Abstract—Main goal of preventive healthcare problems are at decreasing the likelihood and severity of potentially life-threatening illnesses by protection and early detection. The levels of establishment and staffing costs along with summation of the travel and waiting time that clients spent are considered as objectives functions of the proposed nonlinear integer programming model. In this paper, we have proposed a bi-objective mathematical model for designing a network of preventive healthcare facilities so as to minimize aforementioned objectives, simultaneously. Moreover, each facility acts as M/M/1 queuing system. The number of facilities to be established, the location of each facility, and the level of technology for each facility to be chosen are provided as the main determinants of a healthcare facility network. Finally, to demonstrate performance of the proposed model, four multi-objective decision making techniques are presented to solve the model. Keywords—Preventive healthcare problems, Non-linear integer programming models, Multi-objective decision making techniques I. INTRODUCTION AND LITERATURE REVIEW OWADAYS, preventive healthcare problems (PHPs) have been used in substantial savings in the costs of diagnosis and therapy along with the lower capital investment [1]. The main advantage of preventive plans is saving better quality of life by decreasing the requirement for radical treatments, such as surgery or chemotherapy. Among these, the most well-known preventive services are flu shots, blood tests, mammograms, and anti-smoking advice. [2] shows that mammograms taken on a regular basis have the potential to decrease deaths from breast cancer for women between the ages of 50 and 69 by up to 40 percent. Moreover, [3]discovered that 36 percent of breast cancer patients without a mammogram received the diagnosis of late stage cancer, whereas this ratio was 20 percent for the patient group with a mammogram. Preventive healthcare programs can be divided into three groups with regard to their objectives: (I) primary prevention aims at reducing the likelihood of diseases in people with no symptoms, e.g., immunizations of healthy children; (II) secondary prevention aims at identifying and treating people who have risk factors or are at very early stage of diseases, e.g., pap smears to detect early forms of cervical cancer; (III) Mehdi Seifbarghy is with Faculty of Industrial and Mechanical Engineering, Qazvin Branch, Islamic Azad University, Qazvin, Iran (phone: +989121232308; fax: +982813675787; e-mail: seifbar@yahoo.com). Keyvan Roshan is with Faculty of Industrial and Mechanical Engineering, Qazvin Branch, Islamic Azad University, Qazvin, Iran (e-mail: k1_roshan@yahoo.com). tertiary prevention aims at treating symptomatic patients in an effort to decrease complications or severity of disease, e.g., sugar control in a diabetic in order to mitigate vision and nerve problems. [4] found through a survey that the convenience of access to the facility was a very important factor in a client’s decision to have prostate cancer screening. The survey by [5] revealed that the perceptions of lack of access to services were related to the decrease of mammography participation. Since many diseases can be prevented, the current healthcare systems do not make the best use of their available resources to support preventive programs. Most of these systems are based on responding to acute problems, urgent needs of patients, and pressing concerns [6]. An effective procedure to improve the efficiency of a regional healthcare system under limited recourses is to increase the number of people receiving preventive services [7]. The point is accessibility of facilities is an important factor for the success of a preventive healthcare program. [8] introduced three groups of factors that influence the individuals’ use of services in healthcare including structural, financial, and personal barriers. This article concentrates on structural barriers that are directly related to the number, type, and concentration, level of technology and location of healthcare facilities, as well as transportation to services and availability of providers. Most general literature reviews by [9], [10], which focus on public facility location problems with stochastic demand and congestion in the context of fixed versus mobile servers, do not cite any articles on preventive healthcare. [11] consider waiting time as one of the attributes in a client’s overall utility for alternative primary care facilities. The second key factor is the apparent link between volume and quality of preventive healthcare services. Although many design issues exist for preventive healthcare programs, our paper focuses on the configuration of a network of preventive healthcare facilities so as to minimize establishment and staffing costs and the average total time. In representing demand elasticity, the accessibility of a facility can be modeled in terms of its proximity to the potential clients [12], the total time required for receiving the service [13], or an overall utility (Parker and Srinivasan, 1976). Marianov et al. (2008) propose a facility location problem with congestion, by using a probabilistic- choice model to represent client allocation behavior. Recently, [15] proposed a multi-objective facility location problem within batch arrival queuing framework. [16] presented a facility location problem within competitive environment with considering M/M/m/k queuing system for each facility. In this paper, a bi-objective mathematical model for designing a network of preventive healthcare facilities to Mehdi Seifbarghy, and Keyvan Roshan A Bi-Objective Preventive Healthcare Facility Network Design with Incorporating Cost and Time Saving N World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology International Journal of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering Vol:6, No:1, 2012 282 International Scholarly and Scientific Research & Innovation 6(1) 2012 scholar.waset.org/1307-6892/1859 International Science Index, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering Vol:6, No:1, 2012 waset.org/Publication/1859