The collaborative road clearing problem for Post-Disaster emergency response

After a disaster, the immediate response operations focus on reducing human suffering by restoring access to essential relief services, while long-term recovery emphasizes infrastructure reconstruction. This study addresses road clearing decisions in the immediate response phase, when restoring critical connectivity is crucial and conventional repair models may be inadequate. Approaches based solely on cost or speed may fail to reconnect the most critical routes for isolated communities. To address this gap, we propose the Collaborative Road Clearing Problem for Post-Disaster Emergency Response, which prioritizes reconnecting affected areas to critical infrastructure such as ports and airports. The model explicitly accounts for collaboration among multiple clearing teams, allowing joint operations on severely obstructed roads. A mixed-integer linear programming formulation and a heuristic are introduced. The numerical experiments demonstrate the benefits of collaboration, particularly in large networks and scenarios with long clearance times.