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This article presents a Location-Routing Problem (LRP) model to assist decision makers in emergency logistics. The model attempts to consider the relationship between the location of warehouses and the delivery routes in order to maximize the rescue efficiency. The objective function of the minimization of time and cost is established in the single-stage LRP model considering different scenarios. The hybrid self-adaptive bat algorithm (HSABA) is an improved nature-inspired algorithm for solving this LRP model, hard optimization problem. The HSABA with self-adaptation mechanism and hybridization mechanism effectively improves the defect of the original BA, that is, trapping into the local optima easily. An example is provided to prove the effectiveness of our model. The studied example shows that the single-stage LRP model can effectively select supply locations and plan rescue routes faced with different disasters and the HSABA outperforms the basic BA.

Urban traffic demand distribution is dynamic in both space and time. A thorough analysis of individuals’ travel patterns can effectively reflect the dynamics of a city. This study aims to develop an analytical framework to explore the spatiotemporal traffic demand and the characteristics of the community structure shaped by travel, which is analyzed empirically in New York City. It uses spatial statistics and graph-based approaches to quantify travel behaviors and generate previously unobtainable insights. Specifically, people primarily travel for commuting on weekdays and entertainment on weekends. On weekdays, people tend to arrive in the financial and commercial areas in the morning, and the functions of zones arrived in the evening are more diversified. While on weekends, people are more likely to arrive at parks and department stores during the daytime and theaters at night. These hotspots show positive spatial autocorrelation at a significance level of p = 0.001. In addition, the travel flow at different peak times form relatively stable community structures, we find interesting phenomena through the complex network theory: 1) Every community has a very small number of taxi zones (TZs) with a large number of passengers, and the weighted degree of TZs in the community follows power-law distribution; 2) As the importance of TZs increases, their interaction intensity within the community gradually increases, or increases and then decreases. In other words, the formation of a community is determined by the key TZs with numerous traffic demands, but these TZs may have limited connection with the community in which they are located. The proposed analytical framework and results provide practical insights for urban and transportation planning.

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This study presents a multi-stage random regret minimization (RRM) model as an emergency rescue decision support system to determine the emergency resource pre-allocation schedule for the freeway network. The proposed methodology consists of three steps: (1) improved accident frequency approach to identify the black spots on the freeway network, (2) stochastic programming (SP) model to determine the initial allocation plan sets, and (3) regret-based model in the logarithmical specification to select the most minimal regret one considering the factors of the response time, total cost and demand. The model is applied to the case study of 2014-2016 freeway network in Shandong, China. The results show that the random regret minimization (RRM) model can improve the full-compensation of SP model to a certain degree. RRM in logarithmical specification performs lightly better than random utility maximization (RUM) and RRM in the linear-additive specification in this case. This approach emerges as a valuable tool to help decision makers to allocate resources before traffic accident occurs, with the aim of minimizing the total regret of their decisions.