چكيده به لاتين
Establishing animal care centers can contribute to the welfare and health improvement of the urban animals who have lost their natural domicile due to the urban extension. Moreover, the presence of such centers, has a crucial role in urban animal control and in enhancement of health, safety, and welfare of the citizens. From the ancient times, animals have been living together with the mankind and in many cases such an interaction is referred to as a welfare and health index for the both sides. The researches, conducted in this field, demonstrate that the patients who have been in touch with animals, have had significantly speedier healing periods, in comparison with the rest of patients. Hence, establishing a new animal shelter can also be an opportunity to design a place to foster such interactions and to introduce animals to the citizens. One of the greatest challenges that the shelters are facing, is the Length Of Stay (LOS) of the animals inside the shelter; Because, longer LOS adversely impacts on the animals’ welfare and health, thusly, the likelihood of a successful adoption decreases. The longer an animal resides in a shelter, due to the lack of adequate resources and place, the higher the possibility of its euthanasia becomes. There are some suggestions in the related literature for LOS reduction and for increasing the animals’ welfare and health. Considering the related studies, cases, standards and the importance of human-animal interactions, this dissertation aims at: (1) Designing a building for the animal health services, separate shelters for dogs and cats and spaces for interactions between the visitors and the animals. (2) developing a multi-criteria optimization framework for the cages’ layout, such that it maximizes the shelter capacities, minimizes the tension in dogs shelters (with decreasing the confrontation value), and considers the accessibility of the cages and the corridors for the staff and the visitors. The proposed framework employs Genetic Algorithm, to systematically generate and enhance the layouts, Graph Theory, to compute and process the solutions and calculate their fitness values, and a Multi-Criteria Decision-Making tool, TOPSIS, for ranking and sorting the layouts after each iteration.
