No abstract

Despite the fact that many governments try to set rules that guarantee having resistant buildings, there are many vulnerable structures in the world. Hence, establishing earthquake relief centers is an important issue in order to control the effect of an earthquake. Iran is a country in middle east which is severely vulnerable against earthquake. Yazd is a central city in Iran. Since there is no such a study for Yazd city, this city is considered in this study. The parcels' layer of the GIS map of Yazd city has been used as the input of the problem. Since the location allocation of relief centers is a problem with huge complexity and cannot be solved in polynomial time, Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA) has been used to solve the problem. The Whale Optimization Algorithm or The WOA is a particle based heuristic algorithm which is suitable for solving hard problems. The main contributions of the research are modifying WOA function for the problem and designing a new method for creating whales. In order to reduce the time of reaching to the reasonable solution an innovative whale generating method has been designed. The results show that average distance of each parcel from its relief center is 1541 meters and the standard deviation of 114.

Despite the regulations set for the reinforcement of structures, many buildings in the world are vulnerable to earthquakes. Local governments try to be prepared to cope with this possible crisis through establishing earthquake relief centers. Considering the budget provision for creating n relief centers in a certain region, the main problem is yet in which place these centers should be constructed in order to achieve the highest speed and quality in rescuing after an earthquake. The enormous number of points that need relief, and of the many locations that could be candidates for constructing a relief center have caused this problem to be considered as an NP-Complete problem. In this article, there is a focus on solving the location allocation of the earthquake relief center problem. In order to find a reasonable solution, Whale Optimization Algorithm has been used. Classic Whale functions have been modified for this research dedicatedly. Results of the algorithm implementation and its execution on the map of region 1 of the city of Tehran show that with 9 relief centers, the average distance between each point and the center is roughly equal to 760 meters, showing almost 1.9% optimization compared to the best recent articles.