Multi-objective scheduling of wounded rescue vehicle for multi-center collaborative rescue after earthquake

Abstract

The earthquake is destructive and may cause large-scale casualties. Compared with the sharp increase in the number of wounded, rescue resources are obviously insufficient. Reasonable scheduling of disaster-relief vehicles is of great significance for rapid rescue work and shortening the rescue time. In this study, an emergency vehicle rescue scheduling with multiple rescue centers, multiple disaster points after the earthquake for the wounded is  investigated. A multi-objective mixed integer linear programming model was used to simultaneously minimize the total rescue time and the rescue priority weight. In order to solve the problem efficiently, the -constraint algorithm and the two-stage algorithm are proposed. The -constraint algorithm transforms a multi-objective problem into a single-objective problem with -constraint, and then uses a single-objective optimization method to solve it. The two-stage algorithm divides the entire rescue area into multiple independent rescue areas, and converts multiple rescue centers into multiple single rescue center problems to improve solution efficiency. The effectiveness of the algorithm is verified by an arithmetic examples. Compared with the firefly algorithm, the two-stage heuristic algorithm is more efficient, and the solutions obtained by the -constraint method are better than the firefly algorithm, with higher quality and more numbers. Finally, the relationship between rescue time and priority rescue weight, and the influence of the number of rescue vehicles on scheduling decisions are discussed.