Integrated planning of emergency supply pre-positioning and victim evacuation

Natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, and storms cause numerous human casualties and economic losses every year. Emergency supply pre-positioning and victim evacuation, as two important emergency relief operations, tend to be separately considered in the literature. However, there are intrinsic correlations between the two operations in reality, which calls for an integrated planning of emergency supply pre-positioning and victim evacuation. In this study, we propose a stochastic programming model to optimize, in an integrated way, the deployment of emergency facilities, pre-stocking and distribution of emergency supplies and management of self-evacuated victims under two planning goals, namely cost effectiveness and evacuation fairness. We also formulate four comparison models to highlight the benefits of our integrated planning model. With a case study on the development of an emergency preparedness and response plan in Sichuan Province, China, we not only demonstrate the effectiveness and benefits of our approach but also obtain key managerial insights and policy suggestions for better emergency management practice.