A three-stage stochastic model for emergency relief planning considering secondary disasters

ABSTRACT

In the real world, secondary disasters occur frequently after primary disasters, and their diverse and uncertain nature along with the destruction may make the emergency relief operations more challenging. A scenario-based three-stage stochastic programming model is proposed considering the correlation between primary and secondary disasters under uncertain conditions. In order to enhance the computational tractability of the model, an accelerated Benders decomposition algorithm is formulated. In addition, to tackle large-scale cases, an approximation method employing the worst-case scenario in the third stage is established to improve the computational tractability. A computational study is performed to highlight the significance of the model and the efficiency of the proposed solution strategy. The results indicate that, by considering secondary disasters, demand satisfaction can be considerably improved compared with considering only primary disasters.

Keywords:

• Emergency relief
• location allocation
• secondary disasters
• three-stage stochastic programming
• Benders decomposition

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

ORCID

Jianghua Zhang  http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6734-3492

Notes

1 https://www.cea.gov.cn/cea/xwzx/zqsd/index.html

2 http://www.stats.gov.cn/

Additional information

Funding

The work described in this article was supported by a grant from the Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant No. 71571111,71801143,91846205]; the Innovation Method Fund of China [Grant No. 2018IM020200]; the Fundamental Research Funds for Central Universities [Grant No. 2018JC055]; and the Shandong Province Natural Science Foundation [ZR2018QG001]. The authors would also like to thank the Qilu Young Scholars and Tang Scholars of Shandong University, and the Young Scholars Program of Shandong University [2018WLJH02] for financial and technical support.