Abstract
In recent years, more and more disasters occurred. Additionally, the amount of people affected by disasters increased. Because of this, it is of great importance to perform the relief operations efficiently in order to alleviate the suffering of the disaster victims. Immediately after the occurrence of a disaster, there is an urgent need for delivering relief goods to demand locations and affected regions, respectively. Due to roads being blocked or damaged by debris, some demand locations may be out of reach and therefore the delivery of relief goods is hampered. This paper investigates the basic problem of simultaneously unblocking roads in order to make demand locations accessible and delivering relief goods in order to satisfy demand. Strict deadlines for the delivery of relief goods are considered at the demand locations. A formal problem statement is provided, and its computational complexity is analyzed. Additionally, a mixed integer programming model is developed and an exact solution method based on a branch and bound approach is proposed. A computational study investigating the performance of the model formulation and the branch and bound algorithm is conducted.
Highlights
In recent years, the number of natural disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes and tsunamis has grown
In this paper we provide a mixed integer programming (MIP) model for Basic Simultaneous Road Clearance and Distribution Problem (BSRCDP) which we name BSRCD-MIP
We focus on the papers dealing with the simultaneous problem which are most related to BSRCDP
Summary
The number of natural disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes and tsunamis has grown. For example, an isolated location should be supplied in the beginning of the planning horizon, road clearance operations have to focus on blocked roads towards this location first. The density of the population varies among the loca‐ tions in the region This results in different demand for relief goods such as water, Simultaneous planning for disaster road clearance and. Some only slightly affected locations in the region may exist which have neither demand nor supply of relief goods, but they have to be con‐ sidered as they represent road intersections. A delivery of relief goods from a location with supply to a location with a demand is possible if these two locations are connected by at least one path of unblocked roads Note that such an unblocked path can exist at the beginning of the planning horizon.
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