Emergency facility location under random network damage: Insights from the Istanbul case

Damage to infrastructure, especially to highways and roads, adversely affects accessibility to disaster areas. Predicting accessibility to demand points from the supply points by a systematic model would lead to more effective emergency facility location decisions. To this effect, we model the spatial impact of the disaster on network links by random failures with dependency such that failure of a link induces failure of nearby links that are structurally more vulnerable. For each demand point, a set of alternative paths is generated from each potential supply point so that the shortest surviving path will be used for relief transportation after the disaster. The objective is to maximize the expected demand coverage within a specified distance over all possible network realizations. To overcome the computational difficulty caused by extremely large number of possible outcomes, we propose a tabu search heuristic that evaluates candidate solutions over a sample of network scenarios. The scenario generation algorithm that represents the proposed distance and vulnerability based failure model is the main contribution of our study. The tabu search algorithm is applied to Istanbul earthquake preparedness case with a detailed analysis comparing solutions found in no link failure, independent link failure, and dependent link failure cases. The results show that incorporating dependent link failures to the model improves the covered demand percentages significantly. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.