LAUSR

Delivering relief supplies to victims of natural disasters is a very complicated process faced with many challenges: damaged road network, high demand for various materials, scarcity of resources, multi-supply and multi-demand sites, limited transport capacity, etc. Traditionally, outreach maximization is the focus of emergency relief. In this research, we propose a bi-level programming model which takes the aforementioned challenges into full account. We consider two objectives: minimizing the distribution time, and maximizing the allocation fairness. Because the problem is NP-hard, we design an improved differential evolution (IDE) algorithm and numerically compare it with several conventional differential evolution algorithms, including CoDE, SaDE, JADE and JDE. We found that the proposed IDE outperforms the existing algorithms. The feasibility and validity of the proposed model and the IDE algorithm are verified by applying them to the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake in western China.