Shelter site location under multi-hazard scenarios

Abstract

Natural disasters may happen successively in close proximity of each other. This study locates shelter sites and allocates the affected population to the established set of shelters in cases of secondary disaster(s) following the main earthquake, via a three-stage stochastic mixed-integer programming model. In each stage, before the uncertainty in that stage, that is the number of victims seeking a shelter, is resolved, shelters are established, and after the uncertainty is resolved, affected population is allocated to the established set of shelters. The assumption on nearest allocation of victims to the shelter sites implies that the allocation decisions are finalized immediately after the location decisions, hence both location and allocation decisions can be considered simultaneously. And, when victims are allocated to the nearest established shelter sites, the site capacities may be exceeded. To manage the risk inherit to the demand uncertainty and capacities, conditional value-at-risk is utilized in modeling the risk involved in allocating victims to the established shelter sites. Computational results on Istanbul dataset are presented to emphasize the necessity of considering secondary disaster(s), along with a heuristic solution methodology to improve the solution qualities and times.