Planning for relief distribution, victim evacuation, redistricting and service sharing under uncertainty

Abstract

Prompt reactions to the vital emergency relief necessities right after sudden-onset disasters, which are included relief distribution and victim evacuation, are crucial to the mitigation of the disaster influences in the concerned regions. This paper renders a bi-objective optimization model to plan a humanitarian districted logistics network, in which a broad range of simultaneous decisions concerning emergency facility location-allocation, redistricting, service sharing, and routing of vehicles is considered. Two types of vehicle routing problems, namely closed and open, are worked out for land and air routing, respectively. Also, due to the uncertain nature of the disaster, ranging from demand and supply to varied costs, a hybrid robust optimization is proposed to overcome this challenge. Finally, the validity of the suggested model and solution approach on a real case study is investigated. The obtained results and rendered managerial insights reveal the proposed model and solution approach's applicability and effectiveness.