A new mathematical modelling for relief operation based on stochastic programming

Abstract

The number of natural disasters and the people affected by them has increased over recent years. In the last two decades, the field of disaster management and humanitarian logistics has earned more attention. Design of relief logistic network as a strategic decision and relief distribution as an operational decision are the most important activities for disaster operation management before and after a disaster. Since related information can be updated after disaster, we consider a relief helicopter to satisfy the lack of inventory in different depots. In the proposed mathematical model, pre-disaster decisions are determined according to different scenarios in a two stage optimisation scheme. Moreover, we present a meta-heuristic algorithm based on particle swarm optimisation (PSO) as a solution method. Finally, the model for two stages of disaster management is established for several instances. Computational results based on three approaches confirm that the proposed model has proper performance.