A mathematical approach to model humanitarian aid distribution in disaster area

This paper deals with the response phase of humanitarian relief. We model the first operations of distribution of humanitarian aid in a disaster area that correspond to a rich vehicle routing problem (VRP) where we aim at minimising maximum delivery time. Regarding the model attributes' complexity, we develop a column generation approach to solve the optimisation model. This approach relies on a specific pricing problem that generates routes with negative reduced costs to add to the master problem. These routes define the sequence of demand points to visit and the quantities to be carried to each one.