Metaheuristic algorithms to allocate and schedule of the rescue units in the natural disaster with fatigue effect

Abstract

During each year, natural disasters like floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and mass movements cause enormous damages to the people and infrastructure. Designing an effective decision support model to allocate and schedule of the rescue units can reduce economic losses and casualties in the natural disasters. By assuming the incidents as jobs and rescue units as machines, we can formulate the research problem as an unrelated parallel machine scheduling problem. In this paper, a mixed integer linear programming model is proposed to minimize the sum of the weighted completion times and delays at the start of relief operations. After relieving several incidents, rescuers will become tired and then need more time to relieve the remaining incidents which were assigned to them; therefore, we consider this phenomenon as fatigue effect in this research. The rescue units also have different capabilities, and each incident just can be allocated to a rescue unit that is able to do it. Due to NP-hardness of the research problem, three metaheuristic algorithms, namely simulated annealing (SA) algorithm, particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm, and a method based on hybrid SA and PSO (SA-PSO), are developed to solve the research problem. Finally, the developed metaheuristic algorithms are ranked by applying the technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution. The experimental results illustrate that the SA algorithm and the hybrid SA-PSO are better than others in terms of CPU time and solution quality, respectively.