A Hierarchical Model for Relief Distribution after Earthquake Disaster

The efficiency and effectiveness of the disaster relief transportation has direct impact on the health of those in needs. Earthquake and secondary hazards can also cause huge delays in relief distribution and threaten the safety of emergency response teams. In this study, a hierarchical time-dependent dispatching approach is proposed based upon fuzzy clustering of stricken areas and landslide risk analysis. A time dependent fuzzy multi-objective program is built to solve the regional relief assignment with three objective functions: efficiency, fairness, and cost. Based on the regional assignment plan in each time period, a local delivery problem is formulated as a multi-depot vehicle routing problem. LINGO is used to solve the mathematical model. The solution approach and proposed models are tested in the Yushu earthquake case study. The results show that the hierarchical model can coordinate the relief distribution in a timely, but reasonable way under the preference of decision-maker.