A TWO PHASE ALGORITHM FOR THE DISTRIBUTION OF MAMMOGRAPHY UNITS WITH GEOGRAPHIC CLUSTER PARTITIONING

Several studies have shown the effectiveness of mammography screening for the early detection of breast cancer, which is essential for increasing patients’ chances of survival. However, it is not possible without an adequate distribution of mammography units. In this sense, this work proposes a two-phase implementation to achieve an adequate distribution of the mammography units, so that the most significant possible demand is met using both, fixed and mobile units. To this end, a mixed mathematical formulation is used to locate fixed mammography units, and a routing algorithm is proposed to distribute and generate the routes of mobile mammography units. The algorithms are tested with a synthetic and two real instances, proving that using these two types of mammography units can lead to better demand coverage