Fast post-disaster emergency vehicle scheduling

Abstract

Disasters like terrorist attacks, earthquakes, hurricanes, and volcano eruptions are usually unpredictable events that affect a high number of people. We propose an approach that can be used as a decision support tool for a post-disaster response that allows the assignment of victims to hospitals and organizes their transportation via emergency vehicles. Exploiting Operational Research and Constraint Programming techniques we are able to compute assignments and schedules of vehicles that save more victims than heuristic based approaches. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2013.