Dynamic Vehicle Routing for Relief Logistics in Natural Disasters

Abstract

This chapter will introduce the dynamic vehicle routing problem for relief logistics in natural disasters such as earthquakes or typhoons. Natural disasters often cause huge fatalities and property damages. It is apparent that the coordinated and orderly delivery/pickup of available resources helps to mitigate property damages and save lives. Without performing quick and appropriate disaster relief logistics, the losses could be worsened. These relief resources, including food, water, medicine, and other equipment, may be misplaced at first due to the chaos and need to be rearranged in later time, according to the latest situation. Disaster relief logistics using the vehicle routing approach has not attracted much attention and, hence, literature on this topic is relatively rare. Barbarosoglu et al. (2002) present a mathematical model for helicopter mission planning during a disaster relief operation. The decisions inherent in the problem decompose hierarchically into two sub-problems where tactical decisions are made at the top level, and the operation routing and loading decisions are made at the based level. Consistency between the decomposed problems is achieved with an iterative coordination procedure, which transfers anticipated information for the base level to improve the top-level decisions. The existence of conflicting objectives in this hierarchical structure requires the development of a multi-criteria analysis, and an iterative procedure is designed with top-level decision makers to assess the preference of alternative non-dominated solutions. Mohaymany et al. (2003) propose a method to obtain the that is based on two life loss mitigation criteria. One is minimization of travel time between rescue and relief centers and the help-needing population, and the other is maximization of rescue and relief forces‘ service capability to all help-needing population. The main elements considered in the process of emergency paths selection include the highly populated areas and vulnerable and hazardous areas on the one hand, and rescue and relief centers on the other. The proposed path selection process is performed by using some developed computer programs in the GIS environment. Ozdamar et al. (2004) offer a planning model that is to be integrated into a natural disaster logistic decision support system. The model addresses the dynamic time-dependent transportation problem that needs to be solved repetitively at a given time interval during ongoing aid delivery. The model regenerates plans incorporating new requests for aid