Emergency relief routing models for injured victims considering equity and priority

Li Zhu, Yeming Gong (), Yishui Xu and Jun Gu
Additional contact information
Li Zhu: Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology
Yeming Gong: EMLYON Business School
Yishui Xu: Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology
Jun Gu: Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology

Annals of Operations Research, 2019, vol. 283, issue 1, No 60, 1573-1606

Abstract: Abstract In humanitarian aid, emergency relief routing optimization needs to consider equity and priority issues. Different from the general path selection optimization, this paper builds two models differentiated by considerations on the identical and diverse injured degrees, where the relative deprivation cost is proposed as one of the decision-making objectives to emphasize equity, and the in-transit tolerable suffering duration is employed as a type of time window constraint to highlight rescue priority. After proving the NP-hardness of our models, we design a meta-heuristic algorithm based on the ant colony optimization to accelerate the convergence speed, which is more efficient than the commonly-used genetic algorithm. Taking 2017 Houston Flood as a case, we find results by performing the experimental comparison and sensitivity analysis. First, our models have advantages in the fairness of human sufferings mitigation. Second, the role of the in-transit tolerable suffering time window cannot be ignored in humanitarian relief solutions. Various measures are encouraged to extend this type of time window for achieving better emergency relief. Finally, our proposed hybrid transportation strategy aiming at diverse injured degrees stably outperforms the separated strategy, both in operational cost control and psychological sufferings alleviation, especially when relief supplies are limited.

Keywords: Humanitarian logistics; Equity; Priority; Path selection; Meta-heuristic algorithm (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (21)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10479-018-3089-3 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:annopr:v:283:y:2019:i:1:d:10.1007_s10479-018-3089-3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/10479

DOI: 10.1007/s10479-018-3089-3

Access Statistics for this article

Annals of Operations Research is currently edited by Endre Boros

More articles in Annals of Operations Research from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().