Routing multiple work teams to minimize latency in post-disaster road network restoration

Meraj Ajam, Vahid Akbari and F. Sibel Salman

European Journal of Operational Research, 2022, vol. 300, issue 1, 237-254

Abstract: After a disaster, often roads are damaged and blocked, hindering accessibility for relief efforts. It is essential to dispatch work teams to restore the blocked roads by clearance or repair operations. With the goal of enabling access between critical locations in the disaster area in shortest time, we propose algorithms that determine the schedule and routes of multiple work teams. We minimize the total latency of reaching the critical locations, where the latency of a location is defined as the time it takes from the start of the operation until its first visit by one of the work teams. Coordination among the teams is needed since some blocked edges might be opened by a certain team and utilized by other teams later on. First, we develop an exact mathematical model that handles the coordination requirement. After observing the intractability of this formulation, we introduce two heuristic methods and a lower bounding procedure. In the first method, we develop a mathematical model based on a novel multi-level network representation that yields solutions with disjoint paths. Given that it does not coordinate the teams, we present a matheuristic based on a cluster-first-route-second approach embedded into a local search algorithm together with an additional coordination step to obtain alternative solutions with higher quality and in a shorter time. We test our heuristics on data sets coming from a real network from the literature (180 instances) and randomly generated ones (640 instances) and observe the superiority of the solutions obtained by incorporation of coordination.

Keywords: Humanitarian logistics; Disaster response; Road clearance; Network restoration; Minimum latency; Matheuristic (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377221721006585
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:ejores:v:300:y:2022:i:1:p:237-254

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2021.07.048

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Operational Research is currently edited by Roman Slowinski, Jesus Artalejo, Jean-Charles. Billaut, Robert Dyson and Lorenzo Peccati

More articles in European Journal of Operational Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().