An exact Branch and fix coordination (BFC) approach to solve a relief transportation network for disaster management

The number of natural disasters and people affected by them has been increasing in recent years. The field of optimization is a significant element of a relief operation and has been extensively studied so far, especially during the last two decades. The design of a relief logistic network as a strategic decision and the relief distribution as an operational decision are the most important activities for disaster operation management before and after a disaster occurs. In the proposed mathematical model, pre-disaster decisions are determined according to the post-disaster decisions in a multi-stage stochastic problem. Then a well-known approach called branch and fixed coordination are applied to optimize the proposed model. The computational results confirm that the proposed approach has proper performance for disaster management in a multi-stage stochastic problem.

Keywords:

Multi-stage stochastic , Branch and Fixed , Exact solution , Relief operation , Disaster management.