Designing a bi-objective decision support model for the disaster management

Abstract

This paper addresses the allocation and scheduling of the relief teams as one of the main issues in the response phase of the disaster management. In this study, a bi-objective mixed-integer programming (BOMIP) model is proposed to assign and schedule the relief teams in the disasters. The first objective function aims to minimize the sum of weighted completion times of the incidents. The second objective function also minimizes the sum of weighted tardiness of the relief operations. In order to be more similar to the real world, time windows for the incidents and damaged routes are considered in this research. Furthermore, the actual relief time of an incident by the relief team is calculated according to the position of the corresponding relief team and the fatigue effect. Due to NP-hardness of the considered problem, the proposed model cannot present the Pareto solution in a reasonable time. Thus, NSGA-II and PSO algorithms are applied to solve the problem. Furthermore, the obtained results of the proposed algorithms are compared with respect to different performance metrics in large-size test problems. Finally, the sensitivity analysis and the managerial suggestions are provided to investigate the impact of some parameters on the Pareto frontier.