A fast heuristic for routing in post-disaster humanitarian relief logistics

In the last decades, natural disasters have been affecting the human life of millions of people. The impressive scale of these disasters has pointed out the need for an effective management of the relief supply operations. One of the crucial issues in this context is the routing of vehicles carrying critical supplies and help to disaster victims. This problem poses unique logistics challenges, including damaged transportation infrastructure and limited knowledge on the road travel times. In such circumstances, selecting more reliable paths could help the rescue team to provide fast services to those in needs. The classic cost-minimizing routing problems do not properly reflect the relevant issue of the arrival time, which clearly has a serious impact on the survival rate of the affected community. In this paper, we focus specifically on the arrival time objective function in a multi-vehicle routing problem where stochastic travel times are taken into account. The considered problem should be solved promptly in the aftermath of a disaster, hence we propose a fast heuristic that could be applied to solve the problem.