A heuristic relief transportation planning algorithm for emergency supply chain management

Emergency supply chain operations have to fulfil all the demands in a very short period of time, using the limited resources at its disposal. Mixed integer programming (MIP) is a popular method to solve emergency supply chain planning problems. However, as such problem increases in complexity, the MIP model becomes insolvable due to the time and computer resources it requires. This study proposes a heuristic algorithm, called the Emergency Relief Transportation Planning Algorithm (ERTPA). ERTPA will group and sort demands according to the required products, the imposed due dates, the possible shared capacities, and the distances from the demand nodes to the depots. Then, ERTPA plans the demands individually, using a shortest travelling-time tree and a minimum cost production tree. To show the effectiveness and efficiency of the heuristic algorithm, a prototype was constructed and tested, using complexity and computational analyses.