ABSTRACT
In the event of multiple emergencies co-occurring due to a natural disaster, it is crucial to allocate different necessary resources to the emergency locations. Resource allocation becomes a non-trivial job for the disaster management authority, especially when the available resources are insufficient to satisfy all the emergency locations at a time. In our present work, a multievent crisis management system to be used by the authority is proposed based on a two-player non-cooperative, strategic game model. In the proposed system, each emergency event occurring in separate locations is treated as a player in the game, which is assumed to compete with other disaster-affected locations for multiple resources available in limited quantities. Based on a general cost function model, each player incurs a non-monetary cost for obtaining resources from the resource locations. The solution of the resource allocation problem is derived using the Nash equilibrium-based optimization methodology. The existence of multiple Nash equilibria can be handled by using the concept of payoff dominance. If there are more than two players in need of resources, the set of players are partitioned into subsets such that no subset contains more than two players, and then the basic two-player game is used to find the allocation within each subset. A numerical example is presented to show the applicability of the algorithm.
