Location and supply of humanitarian aid distribution points

This article concerns the location of points to distribute humanitarian aid to the population. In such situations, it isn’t possible to make every single home visited by relief teams. Instead, people are required to get to specific distribution points in order to get the survival goods provided that these points are not far from their domiciles (usually within walking distance). Meantime, these distributions points need to be supplied from a set of prefixed humanitarian distribution centers using a heterogeneous and capacitated fleet of vehicles. We model this situation as a generalization of the covering tour problem by introducing the idea of split delivery, and we propose a heuristic approach to solve it. Numerical experiments on random generated data show first that only very small instances can be solved efficiently using the mathematical formulation, and second that the proposed heuristic produce high quality solutions and tackles instances of practical size in reasonable computing times