Emergency Logistics Scheduling Under Uncertain Transportation Time Using Online Optimization Methods

In the immediate aftermath of large-scale disasters, emergency logistics services play important roles in saving lives and reducing losses. Efficient relief logistics scheduling depends on the accurate transport time information for available routes. However, this information cannot be obtained prec...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE access Vol. 9; pp. 36995 - 37010
Main Authors: Zhang, Yutong, Liu, Jing
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Piscataway IEEE 2021
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Subjects:
Algorithms
Data processing
Decision making
Emergency service
Emergency vehicles
Evolutionary algorithms
humanitarian logistics
Logistics
multiphase scheduling
Optimization
Pareto optimization
Resource scheduling
robustness
Route planning
Routing
Scheduling
Stochastic processes
Transportation
uncertain environment
Uncertainty
Vehicle dynamics
Vehicle routing
ISSN:2169-3536, 2169-3536
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:In the immediate aftermath of large-scale disasters, emergency logistics services play important roles in saving lives and reducing losses. Efficient relief logistics scheduling depends on the accurate transport time information for available routes. However, this information cannot be obtained precisely until a vehicle uses the road. Considering the correlation between information acquisition and logistics operations, this paper focuses on a multiperiod online decision-making problem to simulate the information acquiring process. This problem can be referenced for emergency resource scheduling scenarios in which previous decisions impact knowledge for future logistics plans. A multi-trip cumulative capacitated vehicle routing problem with uncertain transportation time is investigated as the basic model. The tradeoff between transportation efficiency and the unknown transport time discovery rate is considered in a multiobjective evolutionary algorithm (MOEA). A memetic algorithm (MA) and a robust optimization (RO) -MA for single-period post-disaster emergency logistics are also proposed to solve the problem for comparison. In these algorithms, evolutionary operators that benefit solution fixing and variation are proposed. In the experiments, a real-world instance is employed. A simulative experimental environment is established. Dynamic information gained within the process of logistics scheduling is highlighted via multi-period online optimization. Different scenarios corresponding to estimates in emergency situations are provided to validate the performance of the algorithms. The experimental results show that the hybrid strategy, MOEA+MA, can obtain the best result in more than half of the considered cases which demonstrates the necessary balance between obtaining information and transportation efficiency.
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ISSN:2169-3536
2169-3536
DOI:10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3061454