Restoration and Humanitarian Aid Delivery on Interdependent Transportation and Communication Networks After an Extreme Event.

摘要

Among the devastating consequences of extreme events, whether natural or manmade, is the disruption of transportation, communication, and other critical infrastructure systems. The restoration of these systems can be especially challenging due to the fact that damaged infrastructures are often characterized by complex interdependencies. Given a region with interdependent transportation and communication networks, both of which have sustained some damage due to an extreme event, we seek to maximize the satisfaction of geographically distributed demands for relief items over time by scheduling work crews to selected restoration tasks and routing the delivery of resources. We develop a mixed-integer linear programming formulation that captures the interdependencies exhibited by the transportation and communication networks, accounts for policy constraints that limit the delivery of resources into the affected region, and ensures that machine movement is feasible given the transportation network status when scheduling machines to tasks. After conducting tests on a variety of model instances, we establish the importance of relief operations during the initial phase of the scheduling horizon, demonstrate how changes in selected network parameters affect optimal scheduling decisions, and identify several key facilities whose construction is vital to the fulfillment of demand for relief items.