Fuzzy Model of Humanitarian Relief Logistics for the Shelters’ Location in the Disaster Region and Evacuation of Population

In recent years, natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, tornadoes, and others have resulted in a significant increase in loss of life and material property. They can cause severe and lasting damage to countries. When the suitable candidate places of shelters' (Shelter Sites (SSs)) location are selected, a group of sites should be selected from them that in some sense better meet the requirements such as: maximizing the reliability index of the selection of shelters, minimizing costs, maximizing evacuation coverage, etc. Ensuring timely evacuation of victims from disaster-affected areas is one of the most important tasks of the emergency management system. We assume fuzziness in the facility location problems’ models, because there is insufficient amount of objective information on disaster region data. A fuzzy multi-objective emergency shelters’ location and victims’ evacuation problem (FMOESLVEP) in the disaster-stricken region is constructed. The model objectives include (1) maximizing the total selection reliability index of opened shelters; (2) minimizing overall costs, including fixed costs for opening shelters, transportation costs for victims, and maintenance costs, (3) minimizing monotonous waiting times for total evacuation of victims, and (4) minimizing the number of open shelters. Objective functions (1) and (3) are novel and their construction and study issues are one of the important tasks of this work.