Introducing a Disaster Relief Routing Problem: Mathematical Formulation and Heuristic Approach

Different natural and man- made disasters result in damage of several part of a country. Sometimes these happenings are unrecoverable and demolish critical infrastructure or reduce total efficiency of public systems. In such cases، a proper plan for distribution of vital goods plays an important role in the quality of delivered services. The proposed model in this article looks for the best strategy of humanitarian aiding relief. There are some homogenous vehicles in each depot to distribute aiding packages among demand points. Since it is not possible to visit all injured people directly، they are allowed to receive their demands within easy walking distance to nearby locations that are visited by a vehicle. The main goal is to minimize the total serving time (as a function of distance) which consist of traveled distance by vehicles and people. We apply some new set of data to investigate the result of the model. Since solving of this problem (even for small size of it) optimally is time-consuming، we also introduce a heuristic method to obtain proper solution in a reasonable time.