abstract
- © 2015 Ivo Erasmo Buzón-Cantera, Jaime Mora-Vargas, Angel Ruiz and Patrick Soriano.This paper models a humanitarian aid distribution problem, which aims to satisfy the basic needs of a population in the aftermath of a natural or man-made disaster. The model considers dispatching goods from local distribution centers to distribution points during a given time horizon covering several periods (days). It takes into account practical constraints related to site's storage capacity, truck's capacity, and restrictions on the drivers' maximum working time. To tackle this difficult problem, a hybrid optimization algorithm combining integer lineal programming and a simulated annealing heuristic is proposed. Numerical results produced for a set of academic instances show that the hybrid optimization algorithm is very efficient, providing excellent results in short computational time.