Routing disaster relief vehicles in a humanitarian supply chain

The decision to allocate the optimal route for ambulances affects the success of disaster response and the safety of victims. In this paper, a multi-objective optimization model is proposed to determine the route of vehicles in response to humanitarian relief supplies. 

Two objective functions are formulated to improve efficiency and effectiveness. The first goal is to minimize the total cost of each route. The second goal is to minimize the total time of vehicle repairs to provide limited relief to victims from all injury areas. The Epsilon (EC) constraint method was used to solve the proposed model.

The applicability of the proposed model is demonstrated through a case study. The results obtained from solving the proposed model are compared with the existing routing scheme. Comparisons show that the results obtained from solving the proposed model are better than current routing programs.

In addition, the results of this study can provide an advantage for decision makers in order to consider appropriate strategies for responding to disasters.