Case study Tehran Earthquake

The case study deals with the location based problems which demonstrate the applicability of the
developed model in the case of Tehran, Iran earthquake scenarios. For choosing the best location for
relief distribution centres for the application of facility location problem plays an important role in
the emergency operation of large scale disasters.

To find a solution for this problem, Department of Industrial Engineering, Eastern Mediterranean
University, Turkey has developed a mathematical model which minimizes the travelling time for both
UAV’s and humans over a set of feasible scenarios which combined mobile and immobile pre-
earthquake facility location problem. One of the main problem will be the network edge collapse in
the corresponding areas and the accessibility will be lose. In this case study it is assumed that, the
people will travel to the locations and distribution centres to receive the reliefs. For the people who
got stuck in the collapsed locations or the inaccessible network edges, the medium scale UAV
helicopters are used for the relief distribution operation.

In the paper (An edge-based stochastic facility location problem in UAV-supported humanitarian
relief logistics: a case study of Tehran earthquake) the solution is proposed based on considering the
non-linear mixed-integer programming model (MINLP), where the analogous to the current model in
the paper are known as NP-hard (Hajipour et al. 2014). Since the NP-hard problems cannot be solved
by an exact methodology, they have used metaheuristic algorithms which is unavoidable. The use of
metaheuristic algorithms such as 1. Genetic algorithm, 2. Simulated annealing algorithm and 3.
Parameter turning are applied to develop a solution for the proposed model.

They have analysed 35 scenarios in order to find an appropriate result in which the GA (genetic
algorithm) is considered as the most effective solution for the problem. It is indisputable that a hike
in the total number of open facilities reduces the objective value. Even though a large numbers
number of open facilities increases the total cost of launching relief distribution centres, low number
of facilities will leads to increase the travelling distance of people and also the flying distance of
UAV’s which affects in the traveling time as well as waiting time and this results in escalating the
fatality rate because of the delay in relief distribution. Thus it become obvious that to satisfy the
demand at low facilities in reasonable time, a large number of UAV’s will be required and this results
in an increase of purchasing cost of UAV’s.

Note: If you can developed from the technical part to support this paper it will be better.