Stochastic programming approach for earthquake disaster relief mobilization with multiple objectives

The goal of this research is to develop an emergency disaster relief mobilization tool that determines the mobilization levels of commodities, medical service and helicopters (which will be utilized as the primary means of transport in a mountain region struck by a devastating earthquake) at pointed temporary facilities, including helicopter-based delivery plans for commodities and evacuation plans for critical population, in which relief demands are considered as uncertain. The proposed mobilization model is a two-stage stochastic mixed integer program with two objectives: maximizing the expected fill rate and minimizing the total expenditure of the mobilization campaign. Scenario decomposition based heuristic algorithms are also developed according to the structure of the proposed model. The computational results of a numerical example, which is constructed from the scenarios of the Great Wenchuan Earthquake, indicate that the model can provide valuable decision support for the mobilization of post-earthquake relief, and the proposed algorithms also have high efficiency in computation. Keywords: relief mobilization, stochastic optimization model, scenarios decomposition, heuristic algorithm.