Dynamic Optimization for Emergency Supplies Distribution with Priority of Postdisaster Shelters

Every year, disasters such as earthquake, flood, and typhoon cause millions of victims. Delivering emergency supplies (including food and medicine, etc.) to shelters in time is critical to ensure that victims receive the necessary support and assistance. Given the instable environment after disasters, the location and priority information of shelters are constantly changing. Therefore, this paper presents a dynamic emergency supplies distribution (DESD) for shelters. By considering shelters’ priority, vehicle capacity, and distribution center time constraints, an integer programming model with dynamically updating strategy is formulated to minimize the total time for the proposed DESD. For this purpose, an improved adaptive genetic algorithm with neighborhood search operators (IAGA-NS) is developed, in which we embed the best worst method (BWM) to determine shelters’ priority. As earthquakes occur frequently in China, an earthquake in Ya’ an City is selected as an example among various natural disasters for the simulation experiments. Finally, several management insights are obtained from sensitivity analysis, which provided for postdisaster logistics management.