Minimizing latency in post-disaster road clearance operations

Abstract After a natural disaster, roads and bridges can be damaged or blocked by debris, causing inaccessibility between critical locations such as hospitals, disaster response centers, shelters and disaster-struck areas. We study the post-disaster road clearing problem with the aim of providing a fast and effective method to determine the route of a work troop responsible for clearing blocked roads. The problem is to find a route for the troop that starts at the depot and visits all of the critical locations. The objective is to minimize the total latency of critical nodes, where the latency of a node is defined as the travel time from the depot to that node. A mathematical model for this problem has already been developed in the literature. However, for real-life instances with more than seven critical nodes, this exact formulation cannot solve the problem optimally in a 3-hour limit. To find a near-optimal solution in a short running time, we develop a heuristic that solves a mixed integer program on a transformed network and a lower bounding method to evaluate the optimality gaps. Alternatively, we develop a metaheuristic based on a combination of Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure (GRASP) and Variable Neighborhood Search (VNS). We test both the matheuristic and the metaheuristic on Istanbul data and show that optimal or near-optimal solutions are obtained within seconds. We also compare our algorithms with existing work in the literature. Finally, we conduct an analysis to observe the trade-off between total and maximum latency.