Acil durumda yardım malzemelerinin dağıtımı için ulaşım planlaması

We study the inventory slack routing problem (ISRP) to improve planning of distribution of the relief supplies, which is a critical issue in emergency preparedness and response. The authority officials construct their distribution plan in case of emergencies (such as terrorist attacks, hurricanes, earthquakes or natural disasters, etc) in order to minimize the risk for human lives. Thus, unlike inventory routing problem (IRP) and vehicle routing problem (VRP), the objective of the ISRP is to maximize minimum slack, that is time until a dispensing site affected by the disaster runs out of supplies. This difference in the objective function requires a solution approach that is significantly different than the ones that are proposed in the literature for IRP or other routing problems. We propose a two-phase approach which includes clustering and routing to develop distribution planning of relief items. We conduct an extensive computational study on randomly generated instances in order to assess the performances of the proposed algorithms and compare the performances of the proposed algorithms with respect to two existing solution algorithms in the literature in terms of solution quality.