Location Allocation of Earthquake Relief Centers in Yazd City Based on Whale Optimization Algorithm

Despite the fact that many governments try to set rules that guarantee having resistant buildings, there are many vulnerable structures in the world. Hence, establishing earthquake relief centers is an important issue in order to control the effect of an earthquake. Iran is a country in middle east which is severely vulnerable against earthquake. Yazd is a central city in Iran. Since there is no such a study for Yazd city, this city is considered in this study.  The parcels' layer of the GIS map of Yazd city has been used as the input of the problem. Since the location allocation of relief centers is a problem with huge complexity and cannot be solved in polynomial time, Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA) has been used to solve the problem. The Whale Optimization Algorithm or The WOA is a particle based heuristic algorithm which is suitable for solving hard problems. The main contributions of the research are modifying WOA function for the problem and designing a new method for creating whales. In order to reduce the time of reaching to the reasonable solution an innovative whale generating method has been  designed.  The results show that average distance of each parcel from its relief center is 1541 meters and the standard deviation of 114