A Location-Inventory Model for Casualty Response Planning in Crisis Situations

When it comes to providing aid to the victims of natural and unnatural disasters, the main goal of a relief chain is to provide the items needed by the victims such as water and food, medicine, shelter and other necessities to reduce the number of deaths caused by reduce the occurrence of disasters as much as possible; therefore, designing, developing and implementing a relief chain can play an important role in finding a suitable answer. The most obvious differences in dealing with the relief supply chain are the unpredictability of demand in terms of time, place, type, scale and volume. Other reasons such chains are the sudden occurrence of a large amount of demand and a very short opportunity to provide a large amount of goods, lack of resources including goods, relief forces, appropriate technology, transportation capacity, the need to provide timely and sufficient supplies after the accident, and the risks in the relief environment. In the present research, a mathematical model for the location-inventory problem for planning response to casualties is presented; also, due to the NP-hard nature of the problem considered, meta-heuristic algorithms were used to solve it.