Optimization Model For Distributed Routing For Disaster Area Logistics

The problem of transportation in a disaster area can be seen broadly as having two aspects: (a) moving people and materials out of an area, and (b) moving people and material into the same area. The common thread here is the use of a limited set of surface and air transportation gateways into and out of the area. The distributed routing problem here is that of assigning one from among the limited set of gateways to various transportation requests in real-time, while maximizing some measure of success for the entire relief mission. We define the general problem, provide an example of the real-time transportation routing problem, and propose an optimization model. The similarity of this problem to a job shop scheduling problem is presented pointing to the fact that a distributed approach based on bio-inspired methods can be developed to counter the large problem size and centralized nature of the integer multi-commodity network model. A small illustrative model of the integer multi-commodity network model is presented and solved.