Ant colony optimization for disaster relief operations

作者：Yi Wei^*; Kumar Arun

来源：Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review , 2007, 43(6): 660-672.

DOI：10.1016/j.tre.2006.05.004

• emergency logistics
• pickup and delivery
• split delivery
• ant colony optimization
• multi-commodity network flow problem

This paper presents a meta-heuristic of ant colony optimization (ACO) for solving the logistics problem arising in disaster relief activities. The logistics planning involves dispatching commodities to distribution centers in the affected areas and evacuating the wounded people to medical centers. The proposed method decomposes the original emergency logistics problem into two phases of decision making, i.e., the vehicle route construction, and the multi-commodity dispatch. The sub-problems are solved in an iterative manner. The first phase builds stochastic vehicle paths under the guidance of pheromone trails while a network flow based solver is developed in the second phase for the assignment between different types of vehicle flows and commodities. The performance of the algorithm is tested on a number of randomly generated networks and the results indicate that this algorithm performs well in terms of solution quality and run time.

• 出版日期2007-11
• 单位南阳理工学院