Optimization of emergency logistics for urban flooding with consideration of rainfall effects

Abstract

Urban flooding frequently causes significant damage to infrastructure and facilities, leading to critical supply shortages in affected regions. Ensuring rapid and efficient distribution of relief supplies remains a key challenge during disaster response operations. This study proposes a two-stage optimization framework for emergency logistics. First, a supply distribution model is developed by integrating resource scarcity indices and disaster severity indices, optimized through a simulated annealing algorithm. Second, a vehicle routing model accounting for rainfall and dynamic vehicle speeds is established, solved using a hybrid Genetic Simulated Annealing algorithm to enhance computational efficiency. Ultimately, through simulation with randomly generated calculation examples, it was found that for the supply distribution model, the allocation model that takes into account both the resource scarcity index and the disaster index is more suitable for scenarios with an uneven distribution of disaster severity. The results of the model that takes into account the resource scarcity index, disaster index and waiting time index shows an improvement of 4% over the model that doesn’t consider the resource scarcity index. The experimental results show that the proposed methodology not only adapts to varying disaster spatial patterns but also balances efficiency and equity under supply constraints, offering a scalable tool for designing resilient urban flood response systems.