A Multi-district Asset Protection Problem with Time Windows for Disaster Management

Abstract

One of the most important goals of disaster management teams is to protect the assets and infrastructures of the community in the event of accidents such as wildfires and floods. This issue requires appropriate operations of all disaster management teams and analysis of available information for suitable decision making and consequently timely response. A mixed integer mathematical model is presented and solved for allocating resources to different districts to protect more assets in an available time. The proposed model tries to protect more valuable assets in pre-determined districts with optimized team allocation strategy. Finally, for validating the model, a numerical example is solved with an exact method and the results of various sensitivity analyses have been reported. The computational results indicate the efficiency and applicability of the proposed model in real conditions comparing to existing classic models.