Shelter-site selection during flood disaster

Abstract

During flood disaster, people in affected areas seek a safe place to stay. Most people evacuate to shelter, which is a public safe place usually organized and provided by government. Not only provides a place for evacuees, but shelter also works as a distributer to provide necessary supplies for people staying in their houses in surrounding effected area. In this paper, we propose an optimization model to find appropriate locations of temporary shelters. The objectives are to maximize the number of flood victims that can be covered or can reach a shelter within a fixed distance and to minimize the total distance of all flood victims to their closest shelters. Since the problem is formulated as a bi-objective programming model, the epsilon-constraint is selected to solve the problem. We present a real case study obtained data from severe flooding in Thailand, 2011.