A New Ant Colony-Based Methodology for Disaster Relief

Abstract

Humanitarian logistics in response to large scale disasters entails decisions that must be taken urgently and under high uncertainty. In addition, the scarcity of available resources sometimes causes the involved organizations to suffer assaults while transporting the humanitarian aid. This paper addresses the last mile distribution problem that arises in such an insecure environment, in which vehicles are often forced to travel together forming convoys for security reasons. We develop an elaborated methodology based on Ant Colony Optimization that is applied to two case studies built from real disasters, namely the 2010 Haiti earthquake and the 2005 Niger famine. There are very few works in the literature dealing with problems in this context, and that is the research gap this paper tries to fill. Furthermore, the consideration of multiple criteria such as cost, time, equity, reliability, security or priority, is also an important contribution to the literature, in addition to the use of specialized ants and effective pheromones that are novel elements of the algorithm which could be exported to other similar problems. Computational results illustrate the efficiency of the new methodology, confirming it could be a good basis for a decision support tool for real operations.

Vehicle Routing Optimisation in Humanitarian Operations: A Survey on Modelling and Optimisation Approaches

“…Ref. [94], on the other hand, raised the issue of a possible assault when transporting relief aid due to the scarcity of supply in a post disaster area where people are desperate for emergency supplies. The problem is modelled as the last mile distribution problem with known numbers for relief aid prior to delivery, which involves a network of unavail-able roads due to damages.…”

“…From these models, various interesting and complex problems are addressed. As a general trend, it could be seen that most work addressed split delivery, such as in [34,42,46,47,[49][50][51]61,71,73,75,76,78,81,83,85,87,94,96,102,116,123,128,158] and multi-trip VRP that can be seen in [31,47,50,61,76,88,90,94,97,98,124,126,129], ref. [134,149,159] normally stressed on the problem of vehicle limitations such as the numbers of vehicle or the fuel limitation.…”

“…Additionally, heterogeneous fleet as can be seen in [75] is usually assumed for works that deal with complex requirements for the selected routing operations. It is also not uncommon to see multi-depots, such as in [70,75,80,87,94,98], and ref. [82] being applied to address a more realistic scenario rather than depicting only one depot.…”

Sustainable Disaster Response Management Related to Large Technical Systems

“…Nowadays, the computerized info-communication and the available software tools allow the development and implementation of special decision support systems. They may utilize a wide range of methods from simple to semi empirical up to multi-criteria and intelligent systems [61,62].…”

Supported Evacuation for Disaster Relief through Lexicographic Goal Programming

“…It is important to note that the use of multi-criteria optimization methods has experienced a significant growth in the last years, mainly because they are able to help the decision maker select the best option between several alternatives, evaluating criteria that may generate conflict. An interesting example that takes into consideration multiple criteria such as cost, time, equity, reliability, security or priority can be found in [38]. In particular, for evacuation models, different criteria have been considered in the literature.…”