Search for ways of optimal spatial placement of healthcare infrastructure facilities: a review of methodological tools

The article deals with the topical issue of territorial management in modern Russia: the search for ways and tools to optimize the spatial location of healthcare networks that meet the accessibility requirements of medical services and economic feasibility for population. The main purpose of the research is to review the existing approaches to optimizing the spatial placement of objects in terms of possibilities of their use in relation to solving a more specific and applied problem: the placement of health infrastructure facilities in the Russian Federation. The main tasks for its achievement are the following: setting the task of optimizing the spatial placement of healthcare infrastructure facilities; determining the existing optimization methods suitable for solving the identified problems; analyzing the possibilities of their use and forming proposals for the use of the most promising of them in the practice of state and municipal authorities of the Russian Federation. The authors carry out the research using general scientific methods of formalization, abstraction, generalization, and methods of system analysis. The main results of the research are the formalization of spatial placement tasks of healthcare infrastructure objects; the criteria identification with which the method of finding the optimal placement of healthcare infrastructure objects should be correlated, the analysis of the most common methods of spatial optimization in practice; substantiation of the agent-based modeling prospects for solving the problem of spatial placement of healthcare infrastructure objects. The scientific novelty of the obtained results are in the comparative analysis of approaches to the instrumental search for the optimal territorial/spatial placement of social infrastructure facilities, in particular healthcare facilities comparing their strengths and weaknesses and feasibility of applying them to solve practical problems. In the analysis of the most common methods of spatial optimization in practice, their use allows talking about the prospects of agent-based modeling for solving this problem. In this regard, the authors define the methodological basis development for creation of agent-based optimization models as areas for further research.