An indirect search algorithm for disaster restoration with precedence and synchronization constraints

Abstract

Abstract When a massive disaster occurs, to repair the damaged part of lifeline networks, planning is needed to appropriately allocate tasks to two or more restoration teams and optimize their traveling routes. However, precedence and synchronization constraints make restoration teams interdependent of one another, and impede a successful solution by standard local search. In this paper, we propose an indirect local search method using the product set of team-wise permutations as an auxiliary search space. It is shown that our method successfully avoids the interdependence problem induced by the precedence and synchronization constraints, and that it has the big advantage of non-deteriorating perturbations being available for iterated local search.

Keywords

• Mathematical optimization
• Scheduling
• Vehicle routing problem
• Indirect local search
• Linear extensions