Emergency path restoration problems

We consider the problem of optimally scheduling the restoration of edges of a transportation network destroyed/damaged by a disaster. The restoration is performed by service units (servers) which have fixed restoration speeds. If several servers work simultaneously at the same point of the network, their collective restoration speed is the sum of their individual restoration speeds. The servers are initially located at some nodes. Each server can travel within the already restored part of the network with infinite speed, that is, at any time can immediately relocate to another point of the same connected component of the already restored part of the network. It is required to minimize a scheduling objective that can be expressed as the maximum or the sum of nondecreasing functions of the recovery times of the nodes, where the recovery time of a node is the time when the node is reached for the first time by a server. We present polynomial-time algorithms on path networks for problems with fixed initial locations of the servers. For problems with flexible locations that should also be optimized, we present polynomial-time algorithms for the case of equal restoration speeds of the servers, and prove that the problems are strongly NP-hard if the restoration speeds of the servers can be different.