Abstract
National disaster-response networks must balance aggregate travel efficiency, worst-case accessibility, and the spatial concentration of operational need. This study evaluates Türkiye’s professional search-and-rescue network using geographic information systems and exact facility-location optimization. The analysis covers 1920 operational records from 2000 to 2022 and all 81 provinces, representing 16 administrative directorates as 15 provincial candidate nodes. Standard-deviation weighting combines event frequency, duration, personnel, and persons reached into a retrospective activity index for maximum-coverage optimization under aggregate and maximum assignment-distance constraints. Complementary p-median and p-center models evaluate one to 15 activated nodes. Full-network aggregate assignment distance is 10,840.980 km, while the minimax distance reaches its 290.916 km lower bound with 12 nodes. Ten nodes cover 73 provinces and 93.642% of the baseline activity score. Complete coverage requires 15 nodes under the joint benchmarks and 12 under radius-only covering. Travel-time optimization yields a 203.583 min minimax bound and shifts the bottleneck from Bartın to Şırnak. Weighting alternatives retain eight to ten centers from the baseline ten-node portfolio, whereas extreme-duration treatments and nonlinear transformations substantially change provincial rankings. Candidate unavailability produces unequal accessibility losses. The findings support targeted reinforcement, forward staging, and local cooperation, subject to validation using actual facility locations and resource capacities.