Routing model for medium disaster relief operations

Indonesia is located in a disaster-prone area with more than a thousand natural disaster cases occurring per year in the last several years. This situation prompts the government to establish a disaster management operation, which is responsible to immediately respond to and alleviate the effect of a disaster. Fast and efficient disaster relief distribution is vital to maximize the survival chance of the affected population. This research aims to develop a mathematical model that controls the distribution flow of relief commodities from the logistics center to a network of demand points. The objective of the proposed model is to minimize the time needed to satisfy all demand from all point of demands. The model was then applied to the case of the 2010 Mount Merapi eruption in Indonesia to test its performance and to evaluate the properties of the optimization problem. The numerical analysis shows the capabilities of the model to handle the medium-scale relief operations. The observed properties of the optimization problem call future research to utilize heuristics or metaheuristics algorithms to solve the problem.