A dynamic dispatching and routing model to plan/re-plan logistics activities in response to an earthquake

The unpredictable nature and devastating impact of earthquakes enforce governments of disaster-prone regions to provide practical response plans to minimize damage and losses resulting from earthquakes. Logistics management is one of the key issues that should be considered for an appropriate response, in particular, the planning of the transport of commodities required during response and the evacuation of injured people. This paper develops a dynamic model for dispatching and routing vehicles in response to an earthquake. We focus on the transport of both commodity towards affected areas and injured people to hospitals. The proposed model is capable of receiving updated information at any time and adjusting plans accordingly. Since speed is a key to a successful earthquake response, the model hierarchically minimizes the total time until arrival at a hospital for injured people, as well as the total lead-time to fulfill commodity needs. We designed experiments to investigate the effect of the network topology on earthquake response rapidity to improve the quality of earthquake response.