Dynamic vehicle routing for emergency relief in post disaster situation

Emergency relief is an important activity in post disaster management to transport essential materials to people in shelters. In this process, time plays the key role. This paper proposed a dynamic procedure for routing the relief vehicles to distribute the materials in the minimum possible time. The contribution of the proposed method was the incorporation of the real-time information about the transportation network condition in route planning. This routing scheme is highly compatible with the real situation and can skip the blockages and reduce the operational time as well. In this paper the problem was modeled as a dynamic vehicle routing problem in which real time network condition is evaluated to update the routing scheme. This study took advantage of intelligent transportation system (ITS), geospatial information system (GIS), global positioning system (GPS), general packet radio service (GPRS), and radio frequency identification (RFID). Tabu search heuristic has been used to solve the model. The model applied to an area of Tehran, capital of Iran, for emergency relief vehicles. The results verified that total travel time for the vehicles is decreased.

کلیدواژه ها:

Emergency relief ، Dynamic vehicle routing problem ، GIS ، GPS/GPRS ، RFID