An Exact Branch and Fix Coordination (BFC) Approach to Solving a Relief Transportation Network for Disaster Management

The number of natural disasters and the people affected by them have been increasing in recent years. The field of optimization is a significant element of a relief operation and has been extensively studied so far, especially during the last two decades. The design of a relief logistic network as a strategic decision and that of relief distribution as an operational decision are the most important activities required for disaster operation management before and after a disaster occurs. In the proposed mathematical model, pre-disaster decisions are determined according to the postdisaster decisions in a multi-stage stochastic problem. Then, a well-known approach called branch and fixed coordination is applied to optimize the proposed model. The computational results confirm that the proposed approach has proper performance for disaster management in a multi-stage stochastic problem.