Heuristics for the design of safe humanitarian aid distribution itineraries

Abstract

After a disaster strikes, one of the main activities to be developed from a logistics point of view is the design of humanitarian aid distribution plans. In this work the problem of designing safe feasible itineraries for last-mile distribution under the risk of being assaulted, as well as assuring the equity of the distribution, is addressed. The task of simply finding feasible solutions for this problem is highly complex. In this paper we present a constructive randomized heuristic to generate a variety of solutions within a small computational time, and we also provide some ideas of how to modify this constructive algorithm in order to use it within a metaheuristic framework.