Goal programming-based post-disaster decision making for allocation and scheduling the rescue units in natural disaster with time-window

Abstract

Natural disasters, such as earthquakes, tsunamis, and hurricanes cause enormous harm during each year. To reduce casualties and economic losses in the response phase, rescue units must be allocated and scheduled efficiently, such that it is a key issues in emergency response. In this paper, a multi-objective mix integer nonlinear programming model (MOMINLP) is proposed to minimize sum of weighted completion times of relief operations as first objective function and makespan as second objective with considering time-window for incidents. The rescue units also have different capability and each incident just can be allocated to a rescue unit that has the ability to do it. By assuming the incidents and rescue units as jobs and machine, respectively, the research problem can be formulated as a parallel-machine scheduling problem with unrelated machines. Multi-Choice Goal programming (MCGP) is applied to solve research problem as single objective problem. The experimental results shows the superiority of the proposed approach to allocate and schedule the rescue units in the natural disasters.

Keywords

• natural disaster management
• decision support system
• multi-choice goal programming
• scheduling