Site selection and vehicle routing for post-disaster rapid needs assessment

In the immediate aftermath of a disaster, relief agencies perform rapid needs assessment to investigate the effects of the disaster on the affected communities. Since assessments must be performed quickly, visiting all of the sites in the affected region may not be possible. Therefore, assessment teams must decide which sites to select and visit during the assessment horizon. In this paper, we address site selection and routing decisions of the rapid needs assessment teams which aim to evaluate the post-disaster conditions of different community groups, each carrying a distinct characteristic. We define the Selective Assessment Routing Problem (SARP) that constructs an assessment plan to cover different characteristics in a balanced way. The SARP is formulated as a variant of the team orienteering problem with a coverage objective. We develop an efficient tabu search heuristic, which produces high-quality solutions for the SARP. We illustrate our approach with a case study, which is based on real-world data from the 2011 Van earthquake in Turkey. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.