Integrated civilian-military pre-positioning of emergency supplies: A multiobjective optimization approach

- A new integrated civilian-military emergency pre-positioning problem is presented.
- A cooperative method is proposed for the problem.
- WWO and BBO metaheuristics are used in the cooperative method.

Emergency supplies pre-positioning is crucial to improve the speed of response and mitigate the effects of disasters. According to the requirements of emergency preparedness for both civilian and military operations in China, the paper presents a problem of integrated civilian-military emergency supplies pre-positioning, the aim of which is to maximize both the expected military operational efficiency and the expected civilian operational efficiency while minimizing the overall cost of pre-positioning. To solve the problem, the paper proposes a solution method that uses a multiobjective algorithm to evolve a population of main location solutions and uses another single-objective algorithm to search optimal allocation sub-solutions for each main solution. Among different heuristics, we select water wave optimization (WWO) to design a multiobjective algorithm for the main problem and select biogeography-based optimization (BBO) for the subproblem, and demonstrate that they have competitive performance advantage in comparison with a set of well-known algorithms.

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