Belief-Rule-Based Intelligent Decision System to Select Hospital Location

Abstract

The general public’s demand of Bangladesh for safe health is rising promptly with the improvement of the living standard.  However, the allocation of limited and unbalanced medical resources is deteriorating the assurance of safe health of the people. Therefore, the new hospital construction with rational allocation of resources is imminent and significant. The site selection for hospital is one of the crucial policy-related decisions taken by planners and policy makers. The process of hospital site selection is inherently complicated because of this involves many factors to be measured and evaluated. These factors are expressed both in objective and subjective ways where as a hierarchical relationship exists among the factors. In addition, it is difficult to measure qualitative factors in a quantitative way, resulting incompleteness in data and hence, uncertainty. Besides it is essential to address the subject of uncertainty by using apt methodology; otherwise, the decision to choose a suitable site will become inapt. Therefore, this paper demonstrates the application of a novel method named belief rule-based inference methodology-RIMER base intelligent decision system(IDS), which is capable of addressing suitable site for hospital by taking account of large number of criteria, where there exist factors of  both subjective and objective nature.