Testing and evaluation of a multi‐commodity multi‐modal network flow model for disaster relief management

The results of the testing of an optimization model in disaster relief management are presented. The problem is a large‐scale multi‐commodity, multi‐modal network flow problem with time windows. Due to the nature of this problem, the size of the optimization model grows extremely rapidly as the number of modes and/or commodities increase. The formulation is based on the concept of a time‐space network. Two heuristic algorithms are developed. One exploits an inherent network structure of the problem with a set of side constraints and the other is an interactive fix‐and‐run heuristic. The findings of the model‐testing and a wide range of sensitivity analyses using an artificially generated data set are presented. Both solution procedures prove to be efficient and effective in providing close to optimal solutions.