A Time-Dependent Vehicle Routing Problem for Disaster Response Phase in A Multi-Graph-Based Network

Logistics planning in the disaster response phase involves dispatching commodities, such as medical materials, personnel, food, etc., to affected areas as soon as possible to accelerate the relief operations. since transportation vehicles in disaster situations can be considered as scarce resources, their efficient application is substantially important. in this study, we provide a dynamic vehicle routing model for emergency logistics operations in case natural disasters. the aim of the model is to find optimal routes for a fleet of vehicles to give emergency commodities to a set of affected areas by considering the existence of more than one arc between each of two nodes in the network (multi-graph network). the proposed model considers fifo property and focuses on minimization of waiting time and total number of vehicles. various problem instances have been provided to indicate the efficiency of the model. finally, a sensitivity analysis is carried out to investigate the impact of different parameters on the obtained solutions.