Dynamic Programming for Multi-Crew Scheduling of the Emergency Repair of Network

One of the most necessary operations in humanitarian logistics is the distribution of relief goods to the population in disaster areas. When a disaster occurs, some parts of the distribution infrastructure may be damaged and consequently make it impossible to reach all the demand nodes and delivering the relief goods. In this study, we focus on the planning of infrastructure recovery efforts in postdisaster response. The problem is the scheduling of the emergency repair of a network that has been damaged by a disaster. The objective is to maximize network accessibility for all demand nodes in order to deliver relief goods to them. We adopt a dynamic programming algorithm to solve the problem when more than one crew group is available. Our numerical analysis of the solution shows the performance of the algorithm. We, also, compare our results with some similar studies to indicate the differences between one and multicrew scheduling.