The location and location-routing problem for the refugee camp network design

Okan Arslan, Gül Çulhan Kumcu, Bahar Yetiş Kara, Gilbert Laporte

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

16 Citations (SciVal)
51 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

The refugee crisis is one of the major challenges of modern society. The influxes of refugees are usually sudden and the refugees are in sheer need of services such as health care, education and safety. Planning public services under an imminent humanitarian crisis requires simultaneous strategic and operational decisions. Inspired by a real-world problem that Red Crescent is facing in Southeast Turkey, we study the problem of locating refugee camps and planning transportation of public service providers from their institutions to the located camps. Our modeling approach brings a new facet to the location and routing problem by considering the location of beneficiaries as variables. We develop a branch-price-and-cut algorithm for the problem. To solve the pricing problem, we introduce a cycle-eliminating algorithm using nested recursion to generate elementary hop constrained shortest paths. The best version of our algorithm efficiently solves 244-node real-world instances optimally.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)201-220
Number of pages20
JournalTransportation Research Part B: Methodological
Volume143
Early online date2 Dec 2020
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jan 2021

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
The authors gratefully acknowledge funding provided by the Canadian Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council under grant 2015–06189 and by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) under the grant number 216M380. Thanks are due to the Associate Editor and to the referees for their valuable comments.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Elsevier Ltd

Copyright:
Copyright 2020 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.

Funding

The authors gratefully acknowledge funding provided by the Canadian Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council under grant 2015–06189 and by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) under the grant number 216M380. Thanks are due to the Associate Editor and to the referees for their valuable comments.

Keywords

  • Branch-price-and-cut
  • Humanitarian logistics
  • Location-routing problem
  • Refugee camp location
  • Transportation
  • Vehicle routing problem
  • Sustainability
  • Refugees

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Civil and Structural Engineering
  • Transportation

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