A location-routing model for assessment of the injured people and relief distribution under uncertainty

Throughout history, nature has exposed humans to destructive phenomena such as earthquakes, floods, droughts, tornadoes, volcanic eruptions, and tropical and marine storms. The large scale of damages and casualties caused by natural disasters around the world has led to extensive applied research in the field of preparation and development of a comprehensive system for disaster management to minimize the resulting casualties and financial damage. Based on this motivation and challenges to the field, this research designs an integrated relief chain to optimize simultaneously the preparedness and response phases of disaster management. Decisions to improve the supply chain include locating distribution centers of relief supplies; the amount of inventory stored in facilities in pre-disaster phase, locating temporary care centers and transportation points of the injured, how to allocate relief services to the affected areas, and routing of the vehicles used to distribute relief supplies and evacuate the injured. The results show that decreasing the capacity of distribution centers increases the amount of shortage of supplies and increasing the capacity of these centers reduces the amount of shortage of supplies.