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Vehicle routing and resource distribution in postdisaster humanitarian relief operations
Author(s) -
Al Theeb Nader,
Murray Chase
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
international transactions in operational research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.032
H-Index - 52
eISSN - 1475-3995
pISSN - 0969-6016
DOI - 10.1111/itor.12308
Subject(s) - solver , computer science , heuristic , operations research , routing (electronic design automation) , humanitarian logistics , scale (ratio) , triage , integer programming , problem solver , emergency management , vehicle routing problem , reliability (semiconductor) , resource (disambiguation) , computer security , operations management , computer network , engineering , economics , artificial intelligence , medicine , emergency medicine , physics , computational science , algorithm , quantum mechanics , programming language , power (physics) , economic growth
After a disaster, supplies must be efficiently and equitably distributed to those in need, wounded persons must be evacuated to triage centers, and relief workers must be transported to affected areas. This complex humanitarian relief problem requires the coordination of numerous vehicles of varying capacities to transport goods, disaster victims, and volunteer workers through a network of roads, some of which may be impassable. To address this problem, a detailed mathematical programming model is presented. Owing to the complexity of this formulation, only small‐scale problem instances may be solved optimally via commercial solver software. Therefore, a new heuristic approach is proposed to solve problems of practical size within acceptable time restrictions. The performance of the heuristic is evaluated for numerous representative test instances.