Dealing with uncertainty by Fuzzy evaluation and robust optimization

The paper addresses the issue of an emergency supply routes planning in an area affected by an unexpected disaster event. Such event can have extensive harmful effects on the availability of the traffic infrastructure, which is a crucial part of any emergency delivery planning. By the nature of the matter, emergency supply routes planning must cope with a great presence of uncertainty in many aspects. It is demonstrated in this work how the fuzzy evaluation and linear robust optimization can be used to handle the uncertainty and plan emergency supply routes. The fuzzy evaluation is used to describe the consequences of a disaster event on routes. The fuzzy evaluation is based on fuzzy linguistic scales, that allows the decision-maker to use vague terms to describe the current situation and create a relevant uncertainty set later used by the robust optimization model for the route planning itself. The robust optimization model is based on robustified shortest path problem. The presented approach is described in detail with example at the end.