Solving Facility Location Problems for Disaster Response Using Simheuristics and Survival Analysis: A Hybrid Modeling Approach

One of the important decisions for mitigating the risk from a sudden onset disaster is to determine the optimal location of relevant facilities (e.g., warehouses), because this affects the subsequent humanitarian operations. Researchers have proposed several methods to solve the facility location problem (FLP) in disaster management. This paper considers a stochastic FLP where the goal is to minimize the expected time required to provide service to all affected regions when travel times are stochastic due to uncertain road conditions. The number of facilities to open is constrained by a certain maximum budget. To solve this stochastic optimization problem, we propose a hybrid simulation optimization model that combines a simheuristic algorithm with a survival analysis method to evaluate the probability of meeting the demand of all affected areas within a time target. An experiment using a benchmark set shows our model outperforms deterministic solutions by about 8.9%.