Multistage assignment optimization for emergency rescue teams in the disaster chain

Abstract

Human resources and potential secondary disasters are often neglected in the existing emergency resource allocation methods. This paper presents a multistage assignment model for rescue teams to dynamically respond to the disaster chain and develops three priority scheduling strategies defined under the burden-benefit accord principle. A designed NSGA-II, C-METRIC and fuzzy logic methods were developed to solve the above multi-objective integer nonlinear programming model. Finally, the experimental scenarios results indicated that the overall performance of the proposed method was satisfactory in comparison with current method regardless of whether the secondary disasters occurred sooner or later. It was demonstrated that the three proposed priority scheduling strategies outperformed the others; however, which of these three priority strategies is most appropriate for a specific disaster situation depends on the maximum rescue time allowed by the disaster.