Locating Disaster Relief Facility Centers in Houston City

Date

2018-05-10

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

Abstract

We study the problem of locating disaster relief facility centers (DRFCs) in the city of Houston which is prone to flood risk hurricanes. We propose a multi-objective optimization programming (MOOP) model for selecting the location of DRFCs. Our multi-objective model attempts to minimize the total logistics cost and at the same time it aims to choose a potential site with lowest flood risk impact. Strategic design phase (SDP) includes the location of the DRFCs while operational level phase (OLP) deals with the robustness. Robustness is analyzed in terms of perturbed MOOP objective through diverse damage scenarios to DRFCs. The impact of factors such as open number of DRFCs, maximum coverage of a DRFC and α on the MOOP objective at different capacity levels are studied. For the MOOP model, two different objective models, total logistics cost (TLC) and flood risk impact (FRI) model are combined using the compromising programming model to obtain a compromise solution. These models are implemented on the real data of Houston. The result obtained from this framework depends on the decision- maker as it is his choice to decide upon the level of flood risk impact he is willing to take. To my best knowledge, this is a first time approach to locate DRFCs in the city of Houston. This research will provide significant insights to practitioners in designing and implementing mathematical models related to flood affected areas.

Description

Keywords

Citation