A Location-Routing Model for Assessment of the Injured People and Relief Distribution under Uncertainty

Abstract

Throughout history, nature has exposed humans to destructive phenomena such as earthquakes, floods, droughts, tornadoes, volcanic eruptions, and tropical and marine storms. The large scale of damages and casualties caused by natural disasters around the world has led to extensive applied research in the field of preparation and development of a comprehensive system for disaster management to minimize the resulting casualties and financial damages. Based on this motivation and challenges to the field, this research designs an integrated relief chain to optimize simultaneously the preparedness and response phases of disaster management. Decisions to improve the supply chain include locating distribution centers of relief supplies; the amount of inventory stored in facilities in pre-disaster phase, locating temporary care centers and transportation points of the injured, how to allocate relief services to the affected areas, and routing of the vehicles used to distribute relief supplies and evacuate the injured. The results show that decreasing the capacity of distribution centers increases the amount of shortage of supplies and increasing the capacity of these centers reduces the amount of shortage of supplies.

Location Allocation of Earthquake Relief Centers in Yazd City Based on Whale Optimization Algorithm

“…Some of the serious consequences would be loss of properties, death tolls and injuries, contagious diseases and homeless people. Reducing these harsh events is the main mission in each relief and response process [3,4]. The stronger logistic plans you have, the easier you can fulfill these goals [5].…”

A Green Hazardous Waste Location-routing Problem Considering the Risks Associated with Transportation and Population

“…Thus, the management of hazardous material substances including a series of actions such as systematically collecting, transporting, treating, recycling and disposing of hazardous substances, is very operational for governments and strategic for environmentalists [5]. The logistic activities of the hazmat motivated several studies to develop efficient optimization models and algorithms to be computationally manageable [6][7][8]. Although many studies have recently contributed to this research area, green hazardous waste optimization is still an open issue and scarce.…”