Relief materials vehicles planning in natural disasters

A variety of relief materials needs to be transported to the disaster hit areas immediately after natural disasters. This paper studies the problem of planning relief materials vehicles in order to maximize their total weight. We propose a new method named substitution equilibrium point which can be used to plan relief materials vehicles. One feature of our model is to consider the substitution among vehicles which is usually omitted in the literature. The simulation experiments show that the transportation fleets are increased effectively considering the substitution between vehicles. Substitution equilibrium point has the same results as integer programming but has much lower time complexity.