ABSTRACT

ABSTRACT: Large-scale disasters cause enormous damage to people living at the affected areas. Providing relief quickly to those affected people is a critical issue in recovering the effects of a disaster. Pre-disaster planning has an important role on reducing the arrival time of relief items at the affected areas and efficiently allocating the resources. In this study, an MIP model is proposed in order to pre-position warehouses throughout an affected area and determine amount of relief items to be held in those warehouses. Time between the strike of a disaster and arrival of relief items at the affected areas is aimed to be minimized. In addition, the model ensures that relief items arrive at affected areas within a certain time window with a certain reliability using probabilistic constraints. Considering instable fault lines on which Istanbul is located, the proposed model is applied to Istanbul case for pre-positioning warehouses a priori to the possible expected large-scale earthquake.