Location and replenishment problems of disaster stations for humanitarian relief logistics along with an application

One of the new pre-disaster activities in Türkiye is to locate the neighborhood disaster stations (i.e., containers) that contain emergency relief items like tents, medicines and canned goods so that people can take the relief items inside them. After a disaster, people should reach to these items easily and quickly. Therefore, locating the disaster stations in the right locations is important. Moreover, emergency relief items inside the disaster stations have an expiration date. Therefore, they need to be replenished periodically to be usable after a disaster. To the best of our knowledge, there is no study in the literature that considers the location problem of disaster stations and the replenishment problem of perishable relief items that are inside the disaster stations simultaneously. Therefore, in this study, the location and replenishment problems of the neighborhood disaster stations are studied. A MILP model is developed for solving the stated problem. The primary goal is to decide the locations of the disaster stations, which will minimize the maximum distance between a post-disaster assembly area and the nearest disaster station. The second objective is to create routes that will minimize the total transportation cost in the replenishment process of the items. Optimal solution is obtained by using the proposed model for solving a small instance in IBM ILOG CPLEX 12.9 and the model is verified. Moreover, a case study is performed by using the real data of Buca/Izmir, and computational studies are done for evaluating the performance of the model.