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Emergency transportation planning in disaster relief supply chain management: a cooperative fuzzy optimization approach

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Abstract

Emergency transportation is the most important part of disaster relief supply chain operations, and its planning problem always involves multiple objectives, complex constraints, and inherent uncertainty. Based on the analysis of several natural disaster that occurred in China since 2007, we propose a multi-objective fuzzy optimization problem of emergency transportation planning in disaster relief supply chains, which takes into consideration three transportation modes: air, rail, and road. To cope with the uncertainty, we employ three correlated fuzzy ranking criteria, and define the β dominance relation for evaluating the solutions of the problem. To efficiently solve the problem, we develop a cooperative optimization method that divides the integrated problem into a set of subcomponents, evolves the sub-solutions concurrently, and brings together the sub-solutions to construct complete solutions. The proposed method is effective, scalable, and robust, and thus contributes greatly to the performance of emergency transportation planning in disaster management.

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Notes

  1. If a vehicle has to pass through an edge more than once, then each time it is included into V(e) as a distinct element.

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Acknowledgments

The work was partly supported by grants from National Natural Science Foundation (Grant No. 61105073, 61020106009) of China. The authors are grateful to the PLA Academy of Armored Force Engineering and the Chengdu Engineering Equipment Warehouse for their kind cooperations in data collection and analysis.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University of Technology, Hangzhou, 310023, China

    Yu-Jun Zheng

  2. Engineering Institute of Engineering Corps, PLA University of Science and Technology, Nanjing, 210007, China

    Hai-Feng Ling

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  1. Yu-Jun Zheng
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  2. Hai-Feng Ling
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Correspondence to Yu-Jun Zheng.

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Communicated by V. Piuri.

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Zheng, YJ., Ling, HF. Emergency transportation planning in disaster relief supply chain management: a cooperative fuzzy optimization approach. Soft Comput 17, 1301–1314 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-012-0968-4

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