Disaster Relief Facility Network Design in Metropolises

This paper studies a strategic level decision problem for disaster relief facility network planning in metropolises. This problem is concerned with some long-term decisions on locating the emergency shelters, locating the supply and medical centers, and maintaining fleets of ambulances and transportation vehicles. These established facilities and deployed vehicles constitute a humanitarian logistic network for rapid responses and reliefs. An integer programming model is proposed to minimize the total cost of establishing such a disaster response network. A Lagrangian relaxation method is developed for solving the problem in large scales. To illustrate the proposed method's usage in practice, a demo example about its application in Shanghai is given. Some numerical experiments are also performed to validate the effectiveness and the efficiency of the proposed model and method.