Throughout history, nature has exposed humans to destructive phenomena such as earthquakes, floods, droughts, tornadoes, volcanic eruptions, and tropical and marine storms. The large scale of damages and casualties caused by natural disasters around the world has led to extensive applied research in the field of preparation and development of a comprehensive system for disaster management to minimize the resulting casualties and financial damages. Based on this motivation and challenges to the field, this research designs an integrated Relief chain to optimize simultaneously the preparedness and response phases of disaster management. Decisions to improve the supply chain include locating distribution centers of Relief supplies; the amount of inventory stored in facilities in pre-disaster phase, locating temporary care centers and transportation points of the injured, how to allocate Relief services to the affected areas, and routing of the vehicles used to distribute Relief supplies and evacuate the injured. The results show that decreasing the capacity of distribution centers increases the amount of shortage of supplies and increasing the capacity of these centers reduces the amount of shortage of supplies.

There is usually uncertainty in the information during a disaster. These uncertainties are revealed in different stages during the time, but they still exist. Therefore, when information is appeared over the time, it is necessary to model and solve the problem in a multi-stage stochastic programming to make more real decisions. In this paper, a multi-stage Relief routing model is presented for a disaster problem. It is assumed that the routing plan can be rerouted in each stage according to new received information. Also, an approximation algorithm is presented based on the two-stage stochastic programming. It is shown that the proposed algorithm is an appropriate approximation of the multi-stage model. Comparison of results with the deterministic model indicates that more survivors will be achieved by the proposed model comparing to the deterministic one and it shows effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Crisis is an inevitable fact of the human’ s life. Fortunately, science and technology development has highly contributed to the reduction of losses and casualties, but it has not reduced the happenings or damages to zero. Crisis management is mentioned as one of the most important scientific-practical issues nowadays that every country stray toward it. This paper targeted the response phase of crisis management that is considered as the most important crisis management phase. The basic operations such as Relief and rescue, evacuation of the injured and victims, and Relief commodities distribution are carried out in this phase. In this study, the locating of temporary depots and routing of vehicles were taken into account by considering the reliability of the roads and allocating the distribution centers. The model is multi-objective and aimed at achieving the following goals: 1) Minimizing the maximum shortage of the disaster points. 2) Minimizing the maximum time of the vehicles by considering the velocity and normal speed of vehicles. The proposed method augmented Epsilon Constraint generalized model for Case study in Sichuan, China. The results showed the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed model was reliable for product distribution centers and making decisions about allocation and assignment of temporary accommodation centers in different parts of logistics network in conditions of crisis.

Accidents and natural disasters and crises coming out of them indicate the importance of precise planning to combat them. Therefore, disaster Relief logistics is one of the main activities in disaster management. In this paper, the response phase of disaster management cycle has been studied. A multi-objective model has been offered for location, vehicle routing and good distribution in damaged area in fuzzy conditions. This model includes uncertainty in handling time, amount of demand in damaged areas and inventories in suppliers in different periods. The model first priority is to minimize total arriving time to the damaged areas and maximize damaged areas satisfaction that can be achieved by maximizing the minimum ratio of total demand covered that ends in a kind of justice in good distribution and the second priority is to minimize costs. To solve the multi-objective model, the global criterion method has been used to produce a single objective model of multi-objective model. Finally, a case study has been done in South Khorasan.

In the response phase the most important step is to assess disaster after occurrence. By disaster assessment, we can obtain all the needed information for controlling, decision-making and also disaster planning. Lack of disaster assessment causes you to make unsuitable decisions based on limited or inadequate data which leads to imperfect disaster response. According to IFRC, disaster response operation will have an unsuitable function without disaster assessment. This paper presents the principles and concepts of disaster assessment.

The rapid development of cities and the increasing urban population in recent decades have made urban planning, management and control more difficult. This problem becomes much more complicated at the time of natural disasters, especially when accompanied by social anomalies. Hence, it is important to ride emergency aid vehicles in crisis situations. In this research, the issue of riding vehicles is considered, taking into account the failure of the route and the failure of rescue vehicles, along with a number of operational constraints. In this study, a two-objective mathematical model for road failure and vehicle failure is considered. In the first objective function, the total amount of customers lost due to congestion in facilities and obstruction of communication paths is minimized. Also, in the second objective function, the average of trip times per unit of time is minimized. It also shows the performance (likelihood of failure) of the used vehicle. In the following, the proposed model was solved for several problems in different dimensions using the two-objective colonial competition meta-heuristic algorithm with MATLAB software and the results were compared with the two-objective genetic algorithm.

Background: Earthquake as one of the most important natural disasters always in short time entails irreparable damage to human settlements. In the aftermath of the earthquake, different types of crises are created which one of them are the life detecting and rescue and Relief to the affected areas. In the initial moments after the earthquake, allocating Relief forces and facilities to the affected areas is very important. According to the researches, time is a critical factor in reducing casualties and victims after an earthquake, so that the first 24 hours after the earthquake is the golden opportunity to help the injured, because at these times the victims are most likely to survive. Therefore, the optimal allocation of Relief and rescue teams to the affected areas is of great importance. Method: In this research, the nearest Relief base to the affected area were selected firstly in order to determine the Relief routing to the affected area then with the help of the relevant experts four paths selected with the highest desirability. In the next step, the routes should be prioritize and optimize based on the desired parameters. The study of the desirability of the routes based on the parameters such as width, length, type and traffic of streets, the use of parcels, the number of floors as well as the type of skeleton of existing buildings in each street were investigated. Each of the criteria and sub-criteria was weighed using the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) process, GIS and available software. Eventually, the final weight of the routes was determined based on the values of their parameters and their sub-criteria, and priority was given to the paths according to these values. Findings: The results show that the building skeleton (materials) with the weight of 0/325 is the most important factor and the parameters such as number of floors, traffic, route width, route type, route length and existing use in the route with weight 0/320, 0/175, 0/071, 0/045, 0/041, 0/023 are ranked after this parameter in terms of priority and value respectively. Conclusion: Considering the values obtained for each of the parameters, it is necessary to use resistant materials such as concrete and metal in construction in order to prevent further damage after an earthquake. Also all safety and construction standards should be observed.

Natural disasters and crisis are inevitable and each year impose destructive e ects on human as injuries and damage to property. In natural disasters and after the outbreak of the crisis, demand for logistical goods and services increase. E ective distribution of emergency aid could have a signi cant role in minimizing the damage and fatal accident. In this study, a three-level Relief chain including a number of suppliers in  xed locations, candidate distribution centers and a ected areas at certain points are considered. For this purpose a mixed integer nonlinear programming model is proposed for open transportation location routing problem by considering split delivery of demand. In order to solve a realistic problem, foregoing parameters are considered as fuzzy in our proposed mode. The objectives of the proposed model include total cost minimization, minimization of the maximum travel time of vehicles and minimization of unmet demands. In order to solve the problem of the proposed model, fuzzy multi-objective planning is used. For e ciency and e ectiveness of the proposed model and solution approach, several numerical examples are studied. Computational results show the e ectiveness and e ciency of the model and the proposed approach.

One of the most important activities need to be performed in times of crisis is to optimize the allocation and distribution of resources among individuals. Time is a critical factor effective to increase the number of people rescued by the Relief activities. In this paper, we present a Relief vehicle routing model in the affected area using covering tour approach to reduce total response time. Also, it is too difficult to determine the real amount of demands for essential commodities, e.g. first-aids, drinking water, etc. Therefore, we consider a fuzzy chance-constrained programming model based on the fuzzy credibility theory. In order to validate the model, several numerical examples are solved by using branch and bound method. Moreover, a Meta-heuristic algorithm based on harmony search algorithm incorporated with stochastic simulation is developed and proposed to solve the problem. The results of the proposed algorithm compared with the results of the exact method and show I % error for the algorithm which indicates the efficiency of the proposed algorithm. To evaluate the efficiency of the proposed algorithm on a large scale, the results of the algorithm have been compared with the results of GRASP method. The experimental results have shown that the proposed algorithms show acceptable performance in a reasonable time.

Background: Earthquake as a major natural disaster always imposes irreversible damages to human settlements in a short time. The transfer of the injured and casualties to safe places and medical centers is one of the important issues after earthquakes. Public transportation system after an earthquake is a safe way to Relief transport, firefighting and etc. Tabriz is one of the major cities in Iran which placed in a high-risk earthquake zone. Proximity to fault line, massive industrial, cultural and historical investment made Tabriz as the most dangerous city in terms of earthquake. However, high distressed areas, narrow streets and the need to time-saving in Relief prove the necessity of optimal routing in order to evacuate the affected people.Method: The model of network analysis used in this study is a 4-step hierarchical process with functions along the way, path speed and type, the obstacles in the path and closeness index; as well as functions, factors and criteria such as capacity of health centers, risk location and etc. has been involved.Findings: The findings are as follows: the time of injured transferring to the hospital varies from 3 to 30 minutes (with an average of 8.14 min); there is no way from the hospitals of Artesh, Sina, 29 Bahman and Shahriyar because being away from the center of the crisis and location; however, the hospitals of Shams, Children’s, Emam Reza have two paths due to their proximity to the crisis centers.Conclusion: According to the results, the time obtained to carry the injured and casualties to the medical centers is not optimal; thus a basic review should be done in order to locate the crisis center in hospitals and medical centers.