A research on vehicle scheduling problem to rescue the victims from chemical and biological terrorist attacks

In this paper, we investigate the vehicle scheduling problem for rescuing victims under the context of multi-location chemical and biological terrorist attacks (CBTAs). A mathematical model is proposed to choose available hospitals for each victim point according to the prime rescue time and dispatch vehicles to transport victims to hospitals depending on the hospitals' treatment capacity. An ant colony optimization (ACO) with an evaluation function is proposed to solve the vehicle scheduling problem and the performance of ACO is tested on simulation data.