Location of temporary depots to facilitate relief operations after an earthquake

The type of humanitarian logistics problem of interest is an earthquake with significant damage, prioritized items for delivery, and an extensive time period over which supplies need to be delivered. The problem of interest is an outgrowth of a recent paper by . [10], where they focused on supplying relief items from a central depot for a prolonged period of time. The drawback of their approach is that long travel distances of vehicles are required between demand points and the central depot. In this paper, we propose the location of temporary depots around the disaster-affected area, along with the required vehicles and resources, to improve logistical efficiency. A two-phase heuristic approach is proposed; it locates temporary depots and allocates covered demand points to an open depot in Phase I, and explores the best logistics performance under the given solution from Phase I in Phase II. Results from computational experiments and an earthquake case study are used to illustrate the benefits of this approach.