A Multiple Objective Mathematical Program to Determine Locations of Disaster Response Distribution Centers

Every year, natural disasters kill thousands of people and affect millions of people as well as causing economic damages. This increasing number of affected people by disasters reveals the need for effective and efficient disaster response operations. This study focus on one of the important disaster response operations: the location of disaster response distribution centers. A multiple objective decision model is proposed to locate the main and local distribution centers simultaneously. The objectives of the model are minimizing distance among demand points, local, and main distribution centers, and minimizing the number of local distribution centers and main warehouses. The proposed model is solved for different instances (different number of candidate demand points, local and main distribution centers) using a goal programming approach. Although the initial results are promising, the completion time increases dramatically as the size of the problem increases.