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A distributionally robust optimization model for designing humanitarian relief network with resource reallocation

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Abstract

Since natural disasters often cause the loss of lives and property, it is necessary to design a reasonable relief network to distribute relief supplies after a disaster. The shortage of relief supplies and timely transportation are the main difficulties in the whole relief network. To overcome these difficulties, we introduce a three-level humanitarian relief network design problem with resource reallocation of relief supplies. Based on the existing relief network system before a disaster, this problem determines the positions of candidate local distribution centers and points of distribution, while considering the relief distribution in the network under an uncertain post-disaster environment. For the uncertain variables, we consider a distributionally robust model with mean absolute semi-deviation (MASD) as a risk measure taken into the transportation time function. Under the partial probability distribution information of the uncertainties, we deduce a tractable framework of the distributionally robust model. Specifically, we derive the worse case form of the MASD objective under an ambiguity set and the safe approximations of the chance constraints under a box + ellipsoid + generalized budget perturbation set. Finally, we demonstrate the efficacy of the model by a real case in Anambra flood.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61773150 and Grant No. 71801077), the top-notch talents of Hebei Province (Grant No. 702800118009) and Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Discovery Grant (Grant No. RGPIN-2014-03594, RGPIN-2019-07115).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Mathematics and Information Science, Hebei University, Baoding, 071002, Hebei, China

    Peiyu Zhang & Yankui Liu

  2. School of Management, Hebei University, Baoding, 071002, Hebei, China

    Guoqing Yang

  3. Department of Mechanical, Automotive and Materials Engineering, University of Windsor, Windsor, ON, Canada

    Guoqing Yang & Guoqing Zhang

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  1. Peiyu Zhang
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  2. Yankui Liu
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  3. Guoqing Yang
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  4. Guoqing Zhang
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Correspondence to Guoqing Yang.

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Communicated by Y. Ni.

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Zhang, P., Liu, Y., Yang, G. et al. A distributionally robust optimization model for designing humanitarian relief network with resource reallocation. Soft Comput 24, 2749–2767 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-019-04362-z

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