Cooperative strategies in two-echelon rescue delivery environment with accessibility uncertainty

Abstract

Cooperation between rescue teams is important to improve rescue performance. Vehicles outside of the disaster area usually deliver rescue resources. A two-echelon rescue delivery model is proposed, considering the isolated island of the disaster area where all the roads to the outside are interrupted. This paper first presents a non-cooperation scenario and then a cooperation scenario in an uncertain environment. Furthermore, two types of cooperative strategies to improve rescue performance are provided in the paper. The two cooperative strategies are a reactive cooperative strategy and an anticipatory cooperative strategy. Numerical experiments are used to evaluate the rescue performances of the two cooperation strategies by comparing them with the non-cooperation scenario. The results reveal that the anticipatory cooperative strategy performs the best in different cases varying in size.