Using Monarch Butterfly Optimization to Solve the Emergency Vehicle Routing Problem with Relief Materials in Sudden Disasters

Abstract

China has one of the highest rates of natural disasters in the world. In recent years, the Chinese government has placed a high value on improving emergency natural disaster relief. The goal of this research was to resolve a key issue for emergency natural disaster relief: the emergency vehicle routing problem (EmVRP) with relief materials in sudden disasters. First, we provided a description of the EmVRP, and de ned the boundary conditions. On this basis, we constructed an optimization model of EmVRP with relief materials in sudden disasters. To reach the best solution in the least amount of time, we proposed an enhanced monarch butter y optimization (EMBO) algorithm, incorporating two modi cations to the basic MBO: a self-adaptive strategy and a crossover operator. Finally, the EMBO algorithm was used to solve the EmVRP. Our experiments using two examples EmVRP with relief materials in a sudden-onset disaster proved the suitability of EMBO. In addition, an array of comparative studies showed that the proposed EMBO algorithm can achieve satisfactory solutions in less time than the basic MBO algorithm and seven other intelligent algorithms.

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

“…Ref. [87] focused on distributing aids while using a vehicle that could originate from any parking area. Here, the parking area is not treated as depot, whereby the vehicle upon arrival will not immediately return.…”

“…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.…”

“…[134,149,159] normally stressed on the problem of vehicle limitations such as the numbers of vehicle or the fuel limitation. However some works addressed the VRP in this scope by assuming flexible fleet size such as [30,87]. Additionally, heterogeneous fleet as can be seen in [75] is usually assumed for works that deal with complex requirements for the selected routing operations.…”

“…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.…”

A Multi-Depot Vehicle Routing Problem with Stochastic Road Capacity and Reduced Two-Stage Stochastic Integer Linear Programming Models for Rollout Algorithm

“…Furthermore, a multi-depot problem is also adopted by several works to address a more realistic problem. Work that addresses both multi-depot and split delivery in the humanitarian operations setting can be found in [16][17][18]. As for works that addressed both multi-depot and multi-trip operations, this is seen in [19].…”