Emergency vehicle scheduling problem with time utility in disasters

Abstract

This paper presents a flexible emergency rescue system which is chiefly composed of three parts, namely, disaster assistance center, relief vehicles, and disaster areas. A novel objective of utility maximization is used to evaluate the entire system in disasters. Considering the uncertain road conditions in the relief distribution, we implement triangular fuzzy number to calculate the vehicle velocity. As a consequence, a fuzzy mathematical model is built to maximize the utility of emergency rescue system and then converted to the crisp counterpart. Finally, the results of numerical experiments obtained by particle swarm optimization (PSO) prove the validity of this proposed mathematical model.