Optimization-based planning to assess the level of disaster in the city

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: After having struck in a major natural disaster like an earthquake, different organizations run about to decrease losses. The lack of accurate demand information is a common problem that all emergency response organizations have to encounter such a crisis. Evaluation of the City disaster level is a mean to feed this information to the disaster response operations. The objective of this research is eschedule a group of experts to assess relief demand. These evaluation teams need to be scheduled to minimize the evaluation time. METHODS: This paper aims to formulate the routing and scheduling of the assessment teams so that real demand information for savings and rescue would be available as soon as possible. The simulated annealing algorithm is used to solve the scheduling problem. FINDING: two cost functions, sum of arrival time and max completion time, were evaluated. The latest is found to perform better in evaluation of the teams performance. CONCLUSION:The performance of the approach is tested on several randomly generated networks and synthesized demand data. The results show a 13 % improvement in the total completion time of operation in comparison with previous approaches.