Research on efficient relief logistics planning under massive natural disasters

The frequency and intensity of massive natural disasters are increasing significantly with climate change. In response, the need and interest in disaster response systems are increasing. One of the disaster response's most important activities is delivering relief resources. This process has distinct characteristics from the general logistics environment, such as uncertainty in information transmission and the importance of deadlines. To enhance the efficiency of this process, a new distributed emergency logistics system is proposed by focusing on emergency logistics for the delivery of relief resources. In the proposed system, to overcome the uncertainty in information transmission, the distributed agent architecture which is applied to facility management and vehicle planning is adopted. In this system, each vehicle as an agent and facility gathers up-to-date information and generates its plan; then, the generated plans are coordinated through communication between vehicles. The proposed algorithm was evaluated through simulation experiments based on the Korean urban environment.