Title Resource Planning in Disaster Response – Decision Support Models and Methodologies Subtitle None

Managing the response to natural, man-made and technical disasters becomes increasingly important in the light of climate change, globalization, urbanization and growing conflicts. Sudden onset disasters are typically characterized by high stakes, time pressure and uncertain, conflicting or lacking information. Since the planning and management of response is a complex task, decision makers of aid organizations can thus benefit from decision support methods and tools. A key task is the joint allocation of rescue units and the scheduling of incidents under different conditions of collaboration. We present an approach to support decision makers, who coordinate response units, by (a) suggesting mathematical formulations of decision models, (b) providing heuristic solution procedures and (c) evaluating the heuristics against both current best practice behavior and optimal solutions. Our computational experiments show that, for the generated problem instances, (1) current best practice behavior can be improved substantially by our heuristics, (2) the gap between heuristic and optimal solutions is very low for instances without collaboration and (3) our heuristics are capable of providing solutions for all generated instances in less than a second on a state-of-the-art PC