Post-disaster relief by vehicle route planning and service time estimation in case of Chennai floods

In a post-disaster situation several organizations carry out response and relief operations in the affected regions. These organizations have vehicles, which travel through several affected regions at different geographic locations, where the relief materials are to be distributed to the victims. In this paper, we propose an integrated method for vehicle route planning and estimation of total time of relief operation. As a case study of Chennai floods in 2015, OpenStreetMap of Chennai is processed in QGIS software to obtain the target locations in affected regions. A branch-and-bound algorithm is designed to obtain the vehicle routes among target locations such that the total traveling time is minimized. Furthermore, while estimating the optimal vehicle routes we also consider two disaster-specific constraints such as different relief-priorities of locations and broken road links between any two locations. A queuing model is used to estimate the service times at the relief camps. This integrated method is simulated to calculate vehicle arrival time and total time of relief for each target location by summing up the vehicle traveling time and serving time at the relief camp. Thus, the victims can be informed beforehand about the time when they will get relief service.