Emergency Distribution Center Selection with Network Reliability Consideration

Due to climate change, frequencies of natural disasters, including earthquake, hurricane, typhoon and heavy precipitations, increase rapidly. The emergency distribution center (EDC) plays an important role in emergency planning and disaster response. During the process of delivering relief to shelters, the infrastructure could be deteriorated by the disaster. Most of the existing models neglect the possibilities of network failure and thus the network reliability is not considered in the process. This research proposes a model with the consideration of connectivity reliabilities for selecting emergency distribution centers under emergency. Firstly, the connectivity reliability is obtained through a simulation-assignment model. Secondly, the connectivity reliability is added in the objective function to reflect the possibilities of network failure under emergency using CPLEX. Numerical experiments are conducted based on a test network and a real city network, and different demand levels of items are simulated to select the EDCs.