Modeling and a Genetic Algorithm for the Two-Echelon Relief logistics Problem

Disaster relief to the affected areas is one of the necessities for any proper planning. Usually during disaster, the accesses to areas are limited; therefore, disaster relief using two-level with different features could be a good solution. In this paper, a two-echelon capacitated relief problem with hard time windows is proposed for people who have been affected in disaster area. The aim of this paper is to determine the optimal set of relief center services to establish the optimal routing aid and relief teams to the affected areas with minimal time and cost. After the introduction of a mixed-integer linear programming, a genetic algorithm for solving the problem of large-scale is provided. The results of numerical examples show the efficiency of the proposed algorithm. In addition, to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed model for the relief problems, other existing models are investigated and examined. Comparative results with other related models such as one-level location-routing problem and covering tour problem in disaster relief illustrate the superior performance of our proposed model.