Developing a Stochastic Model to Establish a Relief Operations Network after Natural Disasters (Case study: A Probabilistic Earthquake in Tehran City)

In recent decades, there is a remarkable increase in natural disasters because of population growth, climate change, and systems integrations, which have led to many causalities (death and injuries) around the world. Therefore, an integrated mathematical model is needed to simultaneously deal with all different issues before and after natural disasters. In this paper, we develop an integrated stochastic model for relief operations supply chain, which has two decisions types. First stage decisions include locating regional warehouses and determine pre-position amount of commodities in each warehouse. Second stage decision includes emergency network design, and determines each commodity flow in the network. The objective function is to minimum the total cost of the relief supply chain. Finally, in order to validate the model efficiency, a case-study of Tehran earthquake scenarios with real data of casualties is analyzed.