Disaster relief routing in limited capacity road networks with heterogeneous flows

In the aftermath of a major earthquake, delivery of essential services to survivors is of utmost importance and in urban areas it is conducted using road networks that are already stressed by road damages, other urban traffic and evacuation. Relief distribution efforts should be planned carefully in order to create minimal additional traffic congestion. We propose a dynamic relief distribution model where relief trucks share limited capacity road networks with counterflows resulting from car traffic. We develop a MIP model for this problem and solve it by decomposing the road network geographically and solving each subnetwork iteratively using the Relax and Fix method.