An Integrated Disaster Preparedness Model for Retrofitting and Relief Item Transportation

Abstract

In this study, a two-stage stochastic integer programming model is developed with a centralized planning perspective to simultaneously address mitigation and response decisions in humanitarian logistics, where the mitigation decisions involve both building and transportation infrastructure retrofitting. The objective is to minimize the total cost of retrofitting, relief item transportation and relief item shortage under a limited mitigation budget. Due to the excessive number of binary decision variables, solving the model becomes computationally difficult. Therefore, we propose Lagrangean relaxation to decouple the overall model and solve it by Lagrangean heuristics. Computational results indicate the efficiency of the solution approaches in providing high quality feasible solutions to problem instances of realistic size and complexity.