Facility Location Model for Home-Delivered Services: Application to the Meals-on-Wheels Program

We present a GIS-based decision support system for the non-profit sector, designed to assist strategic and tactical decision making in the area of home-delivered services such as meals on wheels. Using data collected from existing programs, current and forecasted demographic data, and a series of algorithmic tools, we provide a system for evaluating current meals on wheels facilities, and for making facility location decisions that satisfy coverage and equity requirements. 1. The Home-delivered Services Problem The public, through tax dollars, grant-making foundations, and corporate and private donors, fund the non-profit sector in the United States. With its funding, this sector provides valuable human services for underprivileged and needy segments of the population–the abused, undereducated, poor, homeless, addicted, elderly, and so forth. While the provision of goods and services is performed by the private sector using market principles, and is performed by the government using the political process, the non-profit sector cannot benefit from such underlying organizing principles. Instead, it must rely directly on objective planning methods including clear statements of mission, design of corresponding service delivery systems, and objective performance measures. Such performance measures include efficiency, or the extent to which a fixed level of service is provided using the minimum amount of resources, effectiveness, or the extent to which client population needs are met, and equity, or the extent to which services provided (which may not meet total client needs) are nevertheless delivered in a manner perceived as fair. Society desires that all who need non-profit services have access to them. Facility location planning for non-profit delivery systems is a critical, but difficult problem depending on both the geographic distribution of target populations and the typically small size and limited service areas of facilities. We find that there are three distinct types of human services in regard to facility location planning: home delivered services (e.g., meals on wheels and home nursing), site delivered services (e.g., literacy training and youth recreation), and residential programs (e.g., elderly nursing homes and drug treatment programs). The hardest problem of the three, and one that this paper