Emergency scheduling of engineering rescue tasks in disaster relief operations and its application in China

Disaster relief operations typically involve a large number of engineering rescue tasks, the efficient completion of which is vital to the success of the operations. The paper establishes a model of emergency scheduling of engineering rescue tasks in disaster relief operations, which involves multiple rescue teams and tasks, different and, perhaps fuzzy, processing times, as well as different importance weights of the tasks. We then propose a method based on biogeography-based optimization, develop effective migration and mutation operators, and employ a multiobjective optimization approach for providing a set of candidate solutions for decision support. Computational experiments demonstrate that our approach exhibits competitive performance on a set of test problems. The proposed model and method have been successfully applied to the recent 2013 Dingxi earthquake that occurred in China.