Purpose The U.S. Bureau of Labor1 2008 report stated that the number of workers aged 65 or older is expected to rise by 36.6% from 2006 to 2016. This rise is expected to accompany a 6.9% decrease in the number of workers between ages 16 to 24 and a slight increase by 2.4% for workers ages 25 to 54. This indicates that the industry will face an aging workforce problem that can affect capacity and productivity if workers’ health is not properly monitored.

Network design problems arise in a wide range of applied areas including telecommunications, computer networks, and transportation. In this paper, we address the following discrete capacitated multi-terminal network design problem.