EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Ant colony optimization for disaster relief operations

Wei Yi and Arun Kumar

Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, 2007, vol. 43, issue 6, 660-672

Abstract: This paper presents a meta-heuristic of ant colony optimization (ACO) for solving the logistics problem arising in disaster relief activities. The logistics planning involves dispatching commodities to distribution centers in the affected areas and evacuating the wounded people to medical centers. The proposed method decomposes the original emergency logistics problem into two phases of decision making, i.e., the vehicle route construction, and the multi-commodity dispatch. The sub-problems are solved in an iterative manner. The first phase builds stochastic vehicle paths under the guidance of pheromone trails while a network flow based solver is developed in the second phase for the assignment between different types of vehicle flows and commodities. The performance of the algorithm is tested on a number of randomly generated networks and the results indicate that this algorithm performs well in terms of solution quality and run time.

Keywords: Emergency; logistics; Pickup; and; delivery; Split; delivery; Ant; colony; optimization; Multi-commodity; network; flow; problem (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (70)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136655450700021X
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:transe:v:43:y:2007:i:6:p:660-672

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/600244/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... 600244/bibliographic

Access Statistics for this article

Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review is currently edited by W. Talley

More articles in Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:eee:transe:v:43:y:2007:i:6:p:660-672