Humanitarian logistics under uncertainty: planning for sheltering and evacuation

Abstract

This chapter focuses on a major area emerging in the context of humanitarian logistics: emergency evacuation planning and management. Two major aspects are covered: shelter site location and evacuation traffic assignment. Both are discussed separately before an integrated problem is considered. Throughout the chapter, uncertainty in the underlying parameters is assumed. The major sources of uncertainty analyzed are the demand for sheltering and capacity of the edges in the underlying network. Congestion issues emerge in this context that are also considered. Different paradigms for capturing uncertainty are considered for illustrative purposes, namely, robust optimization, chance-constrained programming, and stochastic programming.