Network Repair Crew Scheduling Using Benders Decomposition Method: A Case Study of Dhaka City

Abstract

Natural disaster sometimes causes severe harm to regular human life. Roads may damage heavily or collapse fully in a severe earthquake or tsunami; so that supply or recuse to several affected areas is interrupted, and the consequence is the post-disaster loss in life and wealth. Therefore, road restoration becomes the first priority to reach the affected areas to minimize loss. To restore the network in a minimal time, scheduling to repair the damaged roads is a crucial task, and Network Repair Crew Scheduling (NRCS) has emerged as an optimization task in the computational intelligence domain. In this study, a Benders Decomposition (BD) based method is developed for NRCS. There are two major steps of the proposed BD-NRCS: identify the possible feasible solutions and then identify the optimal solution. Moreover, different optimization techniques are included in different steps to make the method efficient. The effectiveness of the proposed method is identified applying on a real-life road network scenario of Dhaka.