Vehicle Routing Problems with Covering Constraints and Equity for Humanitarian Logistics
Abstract
A disaster is a sudden and brutal phenomena which causes human life losses, environmental damages, infrastructure perturbation and very important financial costs. A disaster may be either natural (earthquakes, tsunamis, cyclones, etc) or man made (nuclear or chemical accidents, wars,etc). In 2013, more than 95 millions of people were affected by disasters. Humanitarian logistics is defined as a process and the systems involved in mobilizing people, resources, skills and knowledge to help vulnerable people by disaster. In humanitarian logistics context, this paper defines a vehicle routing problem which takes into account covering constraints and equity for the distribution of relief products (such as food, water, medicine) and proposes a solution method based on a hierarchical decomposition.