Allocation of Relief Centre for Flood Victims Using Location Set Covering Problem (LSCP)

Abstract

The frequency of natural disaster has been increasing over the years, resulting in loss of life, damage to properties and destruction of the environment. Compared to other natural disaster, floods are the most significant natural hazard in Malaysia that affect thousands of people. It becomes of great concern especially, during these recent floods, several relief centers were experiencing problems when most of the flood’s victims needed to move to the other relief centers after the existing shelters were also affected by flood water. Furthermore, the relief centers were congested due to the large number of flood evacuees that were over the capacity provided. This study attempts to adapt an advance mathematical location-allocation models in making decision to locate and allocate flood victims during flood event. The Location Set Covering Problem (LSCP), with capacitated constraint is considered and solved using Excel Solver. The determination of safe locations for relief centres with respect to prone area is proposed by adding three new constraints which are the distance from river, elevation from sea level and rainfall amount. A flood case of Kuala Kuantan, Pahang in 2013 was used as the main study area for the analysis as well as the whole Kuantan district. Two scenarios of split and non-split allowed were tested for allocation process and result showed that the percentage allocation and number of relief centers involved increases when the distance increases accordingly. Hence, the model can be considered for better evacuation plan.