Integrated decision making model for urban disaster management: A multi-objective genetic algorithm approach

Abstract

Article history: Received June 2 2013 Received in revised format August 15 2013 Accepted August 15 2013 Available online August 31 2013 In recent decays, there has been an extensive improvement in technology and knowledge; hence, human societies have started to fortify their urban environment against the natural disasters in order to diminish the context of vulnerability. Local administrators as well as government officials are thinking about new options for disaster management programs within their territories. Planning to set up local disaster management facilities and stock pre-positioning of relief items can keep an urban area prepared for a natural disaster. In this paper, based on a realworld case study for a municipal district in Tehran, a multi-objective mathematical model is developed for the location-distribution problem. The proposed model considers the role of demand in an urban area, which might be affected by neighbor wards. Integrating decisionmaking process for a disaster helps to improve a better relief operation during response phase of disaster management cycle. In the proposed approach, a proactive damage estimation method is used to estimate demands for the district based on worst-case scenario of earthquake in Tehran. Since such model is designed for an entire urban district, it is considered to be a large-scale mixed integer problem and hence, a genetic algorithm is developed to solve the model. © 2013 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved