Allocating Emergency Response Resources to Minimize Risk with Equity Considerations

Abstract

SYNOPTIC ABSTRACTIn this paper, we consider the problem of allocating certain available emergency response resources to mitigate risks that arise in the aftermath of a natural disaster, terrorist attack, or other unforeseen calamities. The resulting model formulation is a nonconvex program, for which we derive a tight linear programming relaxation. This relaxation is embedded within a specialized branch-and-bound procedure, and the proposed method is proven to converge to a global optimum. Various alternative partitioning strategies that could potentially be employed in the context of this branch-and-bound framework, while preserving the theoretical convergence property, are also explored. Computational results are reported for a hypothetical case scenario based on different parameter inputs and alternative branching strategies, and comparisons with the commercial software BARON as well as an ad-hoc intuitive method are presented.