Emergency transportation network design problem: Identification and evaluation of disaster response routes

Since disasters have considerable effects on transportation networks, the functionality of an emergency transportation network can play an important role in mitigation phase, especially in developing countries that sometimes suffer the sad experience of almost complete destruction of several cities. Transportation related disaster response activities typically include search and rescue, emergency medical care and fire-fighting trips. In this paper, the emergency transportation network design problem is proposed to determine the optimal network to perform emergency response trips with high priority in the aftermath of earthquakes. The problem has three objective functions designated to identify the optimal routes for emergency vehicles considering the length, the travel time and the number of paths as performance metrics of network vulnerability. A combined approach for considering the three objectives including weighted sum and lexicographic methods is used. The proposed model is solved using a branch-and-cut solution method. The suggested method is tested on the well-known Sioux-Falls network as well as on the real-world network of Tehran metropolis, Iran. Computational experiments are conducted to examine the effects of varying the maximum network length, and the relative weights of other objectives.