Robust optimization approach to emergency mobile facility routing

Abstract

Emergency events such as natural disasters, environmental events, sudden illness, and social security events pose tremendous threats to people’s lives and property security. In order to meet emergency service demands by rationally allocating mobile facilities, an emergency mobile facility routing model is proposed to maximize the total served demand by the available mobile facilities. Based on the uninterruptible feature of emergency services, the model abstracts emergency events act as a combination of multiple uncertain variables. To overcome the computational difficulty, a robust optimization approach and genetic algorithm are employed to obtain solutions. Illustrative examples show that it provides an effective method for solving the emergency mobile facility routing problem, and that the risk factor and penalty factor of the model can further guide decision-making.