Relief Operation Management in an Emergency by Covering Tour Problem concept and possibility of Direct Operation

One of the concepts that are presented in most of areas is sustainable management where human, social and environmental aspects are considered besides of economical impacts. One of the social aspects is agility of relief operations in emergency situations. To achieve agile management in such circumstances, a generalized model of the capacitated covering tour problem with the possibility of direct aid to the affected areas with hard time windows is provided in this study. The injured areas might be covered by relief centers or can be operated by a direct relief from the central station by special vehicles. To improve the model and management the time, constraints of hard time windows have been added to the model. This would prioritize the management of relief operations in injured areas due to the severity of the damage on them. The purpose of this study is to determine the optimal set of established relief centers, distribute rescue teams and relief aid from the central station of the bases, and also deploy relief teams to the disaster that is not covered by any relief center in optimized cost and time. A mixed integer programming model is developed and a genetic algorithm is proposed to solve the model in large and medium instances. The results of numerical examples confirm the validity and effectiveness of the genetic algorithm.