A three-stage and multi-objective stochastic programming model to improve the sustainable rescue ability by considering secondary disasters in emergency logistics

To improve the sustainable rescue ability in emergency relief management, this paper addresses the emergency resource allocation problem by simultaneously considering primary and secondary disasters. A conditional probability based scenario tree is proposed to define the correlation between primary and secondary disasters. A multi-objective three-stage stochastic programming model to minimize transportation time, transportation cost and unsatisfied demand. An alternative single-objective model based on fuzzy auxiliary variables of membership is employed to cope with the multi-objective functions. To improve the computational tractability for large-scale cases, we propose an approximation single-stage stochastic programming by taking the worst-case scenario. Our results based on Wenchuan Earthquake show that the solution in this paper outperforms some normal ways. Moreover, by considering secondary disasters, we find that the sustainable rescue ability can be greatly improved than others only considering primary disasters.