Modeling for the Covering Tour Problem inRelief Condition for Disaster Management

This paper deals with examining the locations of crisis relief zone for events of disruption and crisis to presenta new modeling for it. Due to limited resources in such situations, it may be impossible for rescue teams tovisit all the places; therefore, people in rural areas need to travel to the cities for seeking essential commodities.Cities should be located in an accessible distance for rural areas. The goal of this paper is to develop a Hamiltoniantour on a subset of cities located at the shortest distance in order to cover all affected rural areas during disaster. Agenetic algorithm was proposed to solve the large-scale problems. In order to validate the proposed model, threesmall-scale problems were solved and the associated results were compared with optimum solutions obtainedby GAMS software. The obtained results indicated that the proposed algorithm was efficient and convergent tooptimal solutions. In addition, the corresponding covering tour problem and traveling salesmen problem weresolved by the proposed algorithm. The comparison of results indicated that the covering tour problem was moreefficient. Also, the sensitivity analysis was conducted for the covering tour problem identifying essential conditionsof using the covering problem for crisis relief problems.