A bi-objective model for humanitarian logistics network design in response to post-disaster

Abstract

Disaster management is a broad topic consist various operations to recover victim regions of natural disasters, such as disaster relief (DR) and post-disaster operations. Regarding the considerable importance of sufficient and on time assistance for affected people, this paper investigates the humanitarian logistics network design (HLND) that allocates and distributes the DR resources to affected areas. In this study, a bi-objective mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model has been proposed that maximises lifesaving utility function of wounded people and minimises the consequences of aiding to affected people with delay. Since the required data for decision-making are changing over the time, rolling horizon approach and time-space network have been linked to each other in order to deal with the dynamic essence of this problem. Eventually, we have studied a real case study of Sichuan to evaluate the proposed MILP model. According to the computational results, assignment of DR resources satisfies 57.4%, 43.8%, 57.5% and 14.6% of the demands in Dujiangyan, Wenchuan, Beichuan, and Qingchuan cities only 20 hours after the natural disaster, respectively.