Disaster Assessment Team Routing Using Particle Swarm Optimization

This paper proposes a scheduling based vehicle routing methodology for disaster damages and relief assessment teams. Relief assessment teams are dispatched in disaster area in order to assess the relief demand. In this process, time is very sensitive so these teams are supposed to collect the information of relief demand as soon as possible. In this paper a maximum completion time is proposed as objective function. This objective function is used instead of usual sum of arrival time to show its better performance. This problem is solved using particle swarm optimization which is a Meta heuristic optimization algorithm. The result of proposed model is compared with sum of arrival time. These results show that the proposed model leads to a less completion time of assessment process rather than sum of arrival time. This model is solved in two randomly generated networks for evaluating its performance. The results show 10 percent improvement in small network and 16.9 percent in a big (real size) network.