Locating a Temporary Depot After an Earthquake Based on Robust Optimization

In today s world, natural disasters, such as earthquakes, and crises, such as terrorist attacks, threaten the lives of many people. Hence, this research presents an efficient mathematical model to locate temporary depot, equitable distribution of resources, and movement of injured people to health centers with the aim of developing a multiobjective model and considering multiple central depots, multiple temporary depots, and several types of relief items in the model. This paper is solved in certain and uncertain states, and three different levels of uncertainty are taken into account for effective parameters in robust optimization by considering the traditional and humanitarian objective functions simultaneously. The model is solved by a multi-objective Particle Swarm optimization algorithm (MOPSO). GAMS software is used to validate the proposed model. Some numerical examples are presented. In addition, sensitivity analyses of the model are presented, and the relationship among the number of temporary depot locations, the number of injured peoples to be transferred to health centers, and the number of uncovered damaged points is studied.

Keywords:

Humanitarian crisis management , Multi-objective model , Temporary depot location , Robust optimization , Multi-objective particle swarm optimization (MOPSO).