Road restoration planning oriented to facilitate post-disaster relief operations

Abstract

Disruptions in the transportation network are one of the hardest consequences of a disaster. They have the potential of hampering the performance of emergency aid organizations, reducing the opportunities of saving critical victims during response and recovery phases. The strategic restoration of road network implies the prioritization of those a ected roads whose rehabilitation would reduce travel times, allowing emergency relief vehicles, civilians and restoration machines to move faster through the network. Humanitarian Road Restoration Problem (HURREP) is a relatively new topic in comparison with other research topics on disaster management. In this study, we present a mathematical model which schedules and routes restoration machines and relief vehicles working in parallel on the same network. We adopt the minimization of weighted sum of attention times to communities as the objective function, seeking for a restoration plan totally dedicated to provide support to relief plan. Among other features, our methods are able to deal with di erent relief modes working in parallel, road disruptions that are naturally removed over time (e.g. by evaporation) and vehicle-dependent starting times. We also provided an heuristic algorithm able to solve large size instances of our problem in less than the 2.7% of the runtime limit suggested by the Administrative Department for Prevention, Attention, and Recovery from Disasters in Antioquia, Colombia (DAPARD). We validated the applicability of our methods on real world disaster scenarios through a study case based on the Mojana's oods occurred in northern Colombia on the 2010-2011.