A decision support model for robust allocation and routing of search and rescue resources after earthquake: a case study

The efficient planning of search and rescue (SAR) operations is highly impactful in the disaster response phase, which offers a limited time window with a declining chance for saving trapped people. The present paper introduces a new robust decision support framework for planning SAR resource deployment in post-disaster districts. A two-stage decomposition approach is applied to formulate the problem as iterative interrelated stages of mixed-integer programming (MIP) models. The first stage presents a robust multi-period allocation model for maximizing fair and effective demand coverage in the affected districts during the entire planning horizon. It takes into account the time-sensitiveness of the operations via a time-dependent demand satisfaction measure and incorporates resource transshipment optimization. The second stage optimizes the routing of the resources allocated in the first stage for each district during the upcoming period. It aims to minimize the weighted sum of SAR demand fulfillment times under consideration of secondary destruction risk, resource collaboration, and rest time requirements. At the end of each period, the proposed framework can be re-executed to capture updated resource, demand, and travel time parameters. To tackle the environment’s inherent uncertainty, an interval-based robust optimization approach is adopted. The proposed framework is solved and analyzed for an urban zone in Iran under an earthquake scenario. Results show that the proposed robust models have superior performance compared to a deterministic approach for adaptation to an uncertain disaster environment. More importantly, they prove to be a strong analysis tool for providing helpful managerial insights for the mitigation and preparedness phases.