Research on route optimization of emergency material transportation with multi-depots and demands

The frequency, intensity and scale of sudden public events in our country have shown an increasing tendency in recent years, which seriously threatens the national economy, people´s lives and property. The key to reduce the loss from the sudden public events is to guarantee that the emergency materials can arrive at the place of emergency safely with minimum cost in least time. In this paper, a multi-objective model is built to solve the emergency material transportation problem with multi-depots, multi-demands and some transit points. Our model uses the weighted sum of degree of difficulty, cost, and transit time as the optimization objective. According to the instance verification, the model can be solved with optimization software in fairly short period of time. The results show that the model can effectively solve the path optimization problem of emergency materials transportation, and provide scientific foundation for the transportation decision making.