Title: A multi-objective spatial queuing model for the location problem in natural disaster response

Authors: Mohammad Hossein Zavvar Sabegh; Mohammad Mohammadi; Zeynab Dashti Khotbesara; Abolfazl Mirzazadeh

Addresses: Department of Industrial Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Kharazmi University, P.O. Box 15719-14911, Tehran, Iran ' Department of Industrial Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Kharazmi University, P.O. Box 15719-14911, Tehran, Iran ' Department of Industrial Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Kharazmi University, P.O. Box 15719-14911, Tehran, Iran ' Department of Industrial Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Kharazmi University, P.O. Box 15719-14911, Tehran, Iran

Abstract: Emergency operations are one of the most important components of the emergency response that are required in the short time after the occurrence of disaster. For this reason specified sites for the establishment of the emergency medical centres are needed. In this study, we define a new multi-objective location problem for emergency therapeutic centres that include minimising the average response time, minimising the cost of the emergency medical centres and maximising surface coverage demands, given the size of the budget that is acceptable to guarantee a minimum level of coverage. From the point of view of computational complexity, it is classified as an NP-hard problem, since it will require algorithms with the ability to solve problems in non-deterministic polynomial (NP) time, but the solution can be verified in polynomial time. Moreover, the term hard means that it is at least as hard as the hardest problems in NP. Hence, we used PASA, NSGAII, and NRGA algorithms to solve this multiple objective model. After comparing the solutions, NSGAII had a better performance.

Keywords: multi-objective optimisation; spatial queuing; least of acceptable covering levels; meta-heuristic solution methods; natural disaster response.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSOM.2017.087293

International Journal of Services and Operations Management, 2017 Vol.28 No.3, pp.404 - 424

Received: 05 Oct 2015
Accepted: 06 Apr 2016
Published online: 12 Oct 2017 *

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