Post-Earthquake Scheduling of Rescuers: A Method Considering Multiple Disaster Areas and Rescuer Collaboration

Abstract

Reasonable and efficient scheduling of rescuers plays a crucial role in earthquake emergency relief, which can effectively reduce disaster losses and promote social stability and sustainable development. Due to the suddenness of disasters, the urgency of time, and the complexity of rescue efforts, scheduling of rescuers often involves multiple disaster areas, multiple departure areas, and diverse rescue tasks. However, most existing studies have paid little attention to the scheduling problem of rescuers considering multiple disaster areas, multiple departure areas, and multiple rescue tasks and have not comprehensively considered the collaboration of rescuers and task requirements. Thus, how to reasonably dispatch rescuers to disaster areas by considering the collaboration of rescuers and task needs is a noteworthy research problem. The objective of this paper is to propose a method considering multiple disaster areas and the collaboration of rescuers to solve the scheduling problem of rescuers after earthquakes. Firstly, the collaborative degrees of rescuers are calculated according to the collaborative performance among rescuers concerning collaborative feature indicators. Secondly, according to the performance of rescuers concerning professional skill evaluation indicators, the professional abilities of rescuers are calculated, and the comprehensive performance indicators for rescuers are obtained by aggregating the collaborative degrees and the professional abilities of rescuers. Thirdly, the time satisfaction degrees are calculated based on the times taken by rescuers from different departure areas to disaster areas and the time requirements of disaster areas. Then, the time satisfaction degrees and the comprehensive performance of rescuers are aggregated to obtain the comprehensive matching degrees. Furthermore, a rescuer scheduling model for earthquake emergency rescue is constructed to maximize the comprehensive matching degrees between rescuers and rescue tasks, and the optimal scheduling scheme is determined by solving the model. Finally, a case study and comparative analyses are presented to verify the rationality and feasibility of the proposed method. The results show that the proposed method can reasonably assign rescuers to quickly respond to the needs of rescue tasks in disaster areas, and is better than the other two methods in terms of rescue comprehensive capability evaluation. The proposed method can provide decision support for solving the post-earthquake scheduling problem of rescuers and help to improve the emergency response ability for large-scale geological disaster events.