A Logistics Planning Model to Improve the Response Phase of Earthquake

Natural disaster occurrence and its impacts enforced governments to presents their practical plans to encounter disasters and mitigate its damages and losses by suitable response. Although, disaster managers can utilize their experiences to plan the response of small disasters and manage the related activities however, they cannot handle these activities in some large scale disaster such as earthquake or flood. To manage logistics activities effectively in a disaster situation, decision support system is a fundamental tool. For this purpose, this research attempts to develop a logistics model to scheme logistics activities in a response phase of earthquake. In other words, the presented model provides a transportation scheme for commodities and injured people and aids disaster managers to utilize their resources efficiently. Furthermore, since rapid response is the most important goal in earthquake response phase, the objective function of the developed model is to minimize total unsatisfied demand and unserved wounded people in planning horizon.