A Framework for Optimizing Disaster Relief Logistics and Evacuation Considering Armed Forces Role

Annually 70000 people are being killed all around the world and around 200 million encounter natural and humanmade
disasters. Thus crisis management and especially the effective management of relief logistic activities and
evacuation of the injured from incident areas seems vital. Some important activities when a disaster occurs include
relief logistic activities and delivering these items to the injured people and moving them to medical centers. Military
forces due to their potential and intrinsic capabilities as an aiding force play a key role in disaster response activities. In
recent years the role of armed forces in response to crises has increased due to: the growth in the frequency and scale of
natural disasters, increasing interest of the armed forces to take part in crises response, increasing tendency of humanitarian
responses towards the militarization. In this paper a two-stage approach is used to optimize the transferring of
relief goods to incident areas and evacuating the injured people therefrom, considering the role of armed forces. First,
a numerical model is developed in which vehicles are accounted for by integer rather than binary variable. This model
is used to determine the number of goods and transferred people. Then by using a linear equations system, the exact
instruction for vehicles is determined. In the proposed model the degree of injury of victims and the possibility of their
survival is considered. Also in mixed integer model, the location of temporary medical centers and Local Distribution
Centers (LDCs) near the incident areas are determined. Armed forces available facilities, including personnel and
vehicles that can be effective in relief logistics, are considered. The ultimate objective function tries to maximize the
number of survivors. The proposed optimization approach is applied to East Azarbaijan earthquake in 2012, however,
it is capable of being applied to any other similar situation