A New Formulation and Solution for Allocating Emergency Supplies to Balance the Demands of Public Safety Events

After sudden public safety events, it is important to ensure that emergency supplies are available in time. How-ever, the incidents have created a large demand for emergency resources such as food, medicine, daily necessities, and other materials for the affected areas, which can not be met in a short period of time. Therefore, how to scientifically and rationally distribute the limited emergency supplies is a key factor in meeting the survival needs of the people in the affected areas. In the present paper, we focus on the emergency supplies allocation problem in the areas affected by public safety incidents, considering the stochastic demand for emergency supplies and the balance between people's demands to optimize the emergency supplies allocation. We formulate this allocation problem to be a mixed integer programming problem and propose an adapted Water Wave Optimization (WWO) algorithm to handle it efficiently. We adopt the propagation and refraction operators of WWO according to the solution space of this problem. The results of the computational experiments conducted show that this adapted WWO algorithm performs better than the compared ones in dealing with a set of test cases.