Ant Colony Optimization for Facility Location for Large-Scale Emergencies

The sitting of emergency service facilities plays a crucial role in determining the efficiency of safety protection and emergency response. Research on emergency service facilities is abundant. However, this research does not typically address the particular conditions that arise when locating facilities to service large-scale emergencies, such as earthquakes, terrorist attacks, etc. In this paper, we form an improved model for determining the facility locations in response to large-scale emergencies, based on Jia, Ordonez, and Dessouky ´s research. The problem is formulated as a maximal covering problem with multiple facility quantity-of-coverage requirements. In this paper, ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm is developed to solve the Large-scale emergency location problem. We evaluate the performance of the model and algorithm by using illustrative emergency examples. We show that the model and ACO algorithm provides an effective method to facility location for large-Scale Emergencies.