A Network Equilibrium Model for Emergency Logistics Response under Disaster Spreading

Abstract

Quick and accurate response to the relief demand is vital to an emergency logistics network under disaster spreading. In this paper, we first characterize the disaster spreading process to forecast the time-varying relief demand, by using an epidemic model to analyze the relationships among three groups of affected individuals. Then, a new three-tiered emergency logistics network equilibrium model is formulated to satisfy the predicted urgent demand with the least relief cost, in particular the time cost. We perform numerical simulation to demonstrate the effectiveness of our model, and discuss the impact of the important parameters.