A critical assessment of metaheuristics for scheduling emergency infrastructure inspections

Search and rescue operations following natural disasters have become the cornerstone for minimizing the adverse social effects and the impact of these hazards. Despite their importance, the literature has not adequately dealt with post disaster operations at least in part because of the difficulty in rapidly solving the mathematically complex problems involved. In this paper we consider two important issues within the scope of post natural disaster actions; first, we develop deterministic and probabilistic districting and routing problems for scheduling infrastructure inspection crews following a natural disaster in urban areas; second, we assess and compare five metaheuristic optimization algorithms for solving these districting and routing problems. Results suggest that the five approaches examined offer applicable as well as fast solutions but with varying qualitative characteristics; selection of the preferred approach for practical applications will largely depend upon the network’s characteristics.