Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering

Abstract

The consequences of natural disasters have significantly increased the loss of human life and material damage in recent years. Such disasters as earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes and others can cause serious and lasting damage to regions and countries. Therefore, it is important to know how the transport fleets are organized and managed in the disaster areas, as it makes a crucial contribution to the efficiency of the relief distribution process. When the suitable places of distribution centers (DCs) are selected, a group of places should be selected from them that in some sense better meet the requirements such as: maximizing the reliability index of the selection of DCs, minimizing costs, maximizing demand coverage etc. Given the issues outlined in this study, we will consider a fuzzy multi-objective emergency location and vehicle routing problem (FMOELVRP). It is essential to allocate disaster affected areas and vehicles for DCs. It generates routes from DC to disaster-affected areas, taking into account distributed demand-supply. The purposes of the model are: (1) maximizing the total selection reliability index of opened DCs, (2) minimizing the fixed costs to establish DCs and the vehicle travelling cost, (3) minimizing the maximum travel time of the vehicle routes, and (4) maximizing the minimum possibilistic reliability of the routes for all service vehicles in the process. Objective functions of (1) and (4) are novel and their construction and study issues are one of the important tasks of this work. The input to the mathematical model of the system are objective data, as well as expert evaluations. The outputs of the system will solve the FMOELVRP for disasters’ zones. The Intelligent Support System for the FMOELVRP in disaster zones will be developed in our future research.