Efficient multi-objective tabu search for emergency equipment maintenance scheduling in disaster rescue

The paper describes a mathematical model of the emergency equipment maintenance scheduling problem particularly in disaster rescue operations, which aims to achieve a good balance between operational capability achieved by maintenance, cost-effectiveness, maintenance risks, and reserved maintenance capability for sustainable operations. We design a compact solution encoding that greatly facilitates the search process, and develop an efficient multi-objective tabu search algorithm that evolves a set of solutions towards the Pareto optimal frontier, using a weighted function based on the decision-maker's preference to guide the search procedures. Simulation experiments and real-world application results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.