Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem Under Deadlines: An Application to Flooding Crisis

Abstract

Facing the issue of flash floods and their important damage both to victims and infrastructures, involved authorities are interested in the study of the ways to answer at best this kind of crisis both in the long-term and emergency phase. The victim relief operations can be optimized to help rescue teams improve their management of the crisis situation. It is translated into the field by the development of a decision support tool for victim relief operations. The problem addressed is a Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) for the rescue vehicles. This article focuses on searching for efficient algorithms both in terms of execution time and intervention promptness to solve this VRPs. Data from a past crisis is used in this paper to evaluate the performances of the algorithms on problems as close to field experience as possible. Since rescue teams need to divide their forces into the different impacted sectors during flooding, algorithms to dispatch the resources (rescue team's vehicles) between areas of intervention are studied.