A Simultaneous Location, Routing and Scheduling Model for Transporting Evacuees with Time Window and Multiple Depots

After natural disasters and unexpected events, one of the most vital actions of disaster response phase is to transport evacuees from disaster areas to safe places. In this paper, decisions of the location of shelters and routing and scheduling of relief vehicles at the same time are modeled for a two-level network including depots of vehicles, affected areas, and shelters. In the evacuation operation, the possibility of servicing to evacuees in each affected area by several vehicles, existence of multiple depots of heterogeneous vehicles and time window constraints are considered. To solve the proposed model and demonstrate its efficiency, a numerical example was solved by exact method, and it was done the sensitivity analysis on the problem main parameters. Results show that the number of shelters to locate evacuees and capacity of relief vehicles effects on total times for vehicles to get to affected areas and shelters.